Well you certainly didn’t mention Robocop.
How about Taxi Driver, which I’ve read some accounts that claim it is an updated version of the John Wayne movie the Searchers?
Martin Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schraeder were both big fans of the western, and the central idea (a man is obsessed with “rescuing” a younger woman from what he believes to be a savage society, only she isn’t at all interested in being rescued) is the same. There are also little touches that may be slight homages to the earlier movie, such as DeNiro’s character Travis Bickle wearing cowboy boots throughout the movie.
We’re getting into that realm of Stealing rather than sort-of adaptation, but I have things to say about this case, so I will.
Van Vogt’s first published story was Black Destroyer, and is the first case I know of about a Monster Loose on a Starship. That alone makes it a candidate for an ancestor to Alien. Discord in Scarlet, which also featured a monster aboard a starship, was one or two stories later. Van Vogt eventually put the two, tofgether with other short stories of his, together I a single coherent novel (something he called a “Fix-up”. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction took the term and used it as standard. Lots of writers did, and continue to do, this sort of thing), entitled the Voyage of the Space Beagle
In the 1950s SF writer Jerome Bixby scripted one of the better 1950s science fiction movies, It! The Terror from Beyond Space. It featured a monster loose on a space ship, but otherwise didn’t closely resemble van Vogt’s work. I highly recommend it. Another sf movie from around the same time was Roger Corman’s cheapie, Night of the Blood Beast, which featured an intelligent space beast that comes to earth on a terran space probe. The titular beast implants its young into an astronaut, where they’re found by X-ray. It’s the first case of this trope in a movie that I know of. I don’t know if Corman’s writer got the idea from Van Vogt or from analogy with earth insects like the Ichneuman Fly.
In 1979 the movie Alien came out. I think it owes a LOT more to Boxby’s script than it does to Van Vogt. The plot is pretty similar, with the alien creature getting on board (in a different way), then prowling through the ventilation ducts as it takes out the crew one by one, leaving them alive in some cases. In Bixby’s case, its motive is the water each crewman has in his body. In Alien it never is clear (although in a deleted scene Ripley finds Captain Dallas stuck up in alien goop with embryos inside him). At the end, the creature is killed when they open the airlock (although in It! it’s from lack of oxygen, not being blasted into space). There are some scenes in Alien that seem lifted from the 1960s film Planet of Vampires, but the only other film is that idea of implanted embryos, which I suspect came from Night of the Blood Beast, rather than from Van Vogt. Screenwriter Dan O’Bannon strikes me as a guy who’d get his ideas more from previous movies than from books (despite him naming the ship “Nostromo” or, in one discarded version “Snark”. Them’s literary references) In any event, the other major influences are movies, so I’d credit this one to the movies, as well.
I think Bixby had a better case against Ridley Scott than Van Vogt did, and someone on this Board said he had been counseled to sue, as well, but he never did.
Sorry – my oversight. I meant to.
While it certainly derives the basic plot from The Tempest (and was sold that way when they pitched the film), I can’t help observing that the motivations of the characters are all almost completely different. To my mind, Forbidden Planet definitely isn’t just “The Tempest in Space” (The way the film Outland definitely IS “High Noon in Space”)
I’ll come at it from the opposite side. When the movie Juno (2007) came out, a segment of the Asian-o-phile internet went nuts accusing screenwriter Diablo Cody from stealing her screenplay from the Korean film Jenny, Juno, which was released in early 2005. There are some similarities. Teen pregnancy; family disapproval; and the types of things that come from that. I’m sure the accusers have a more point-by-point spreadsheet of suspicious similarities. The IMDb nixed its comments section, but they were filled with folks calling Cody a thief, and worse.
I’ve seen Jenny, Juno. In fact, I watched it in April 2007, about 6 months before I watched Juno. It never occurred to me that the latter was a rip-off of the former. As someone who considers himself an aficionado of Asian films and one of the biggest fans of Korean movies you’ll ever meet (over 800 watched), if I thought there was anything to the accusations, I’d be on board.
But its a bullshit accusation. I don’t even think it was an instance of watching something and subconsciously incorporating elements into your “original” work. I totally believe Cody when she claims she was completely unaware of the earlier film. Sure, there are a lot of similarities. How can you have a “young teen pregnancy movie” that doesn’t cover similar ground as other “young teen pregnancy movies”? (Plus, in the Korean film, Juno was the boy.)
For what it’s worth, **Juno **was a much better film. Much.
Of course, “The Stars My Destination” bears more than a few suspicious similarities to “The Count of Monte Cristo.”
Another one was The Adventures of Captain Africa.
And following this trend, Zathura is just Jumanji set in space