I’m looking for examples of a very specific sort of movie series. I know of one example of this kind of series. I’ll explain what I mean by this and why this one series is an example of it, but first let me give a couple of examples of what I’m not looking for.
I’m not looking for movies that steal ideas from other works of art without explicit acknowledgment. This is so common in Hollywood that it’s hardly worth noting. A movie will model its plot on some other movie or a book or a graphic novel or whatever without bothering to mention that in the credits. Sometimes this is because the filmmakers own the rights to make a film from those ideas but aren’t required to mention that in the credits. Sometimes they didn’t bother to pay for the rights. In these cases, sometimes the owners of the copyrights for the original works will attempt to sue and sometimes they won’t bother. Sometimes the suit will be settled out of court and sometimes it will go to trial. Sometimes the copyright owners will win and sometimes they won’t. That’s not what I’m talking about.
I’m also not talking about parody protected by copyright law. For instance, each of the films in the Scary Movie series parodies various horror movies. Parodies are protected by law and don’t need to pay the original copyright owner, but in any case everyone knows perfectly well that these movies are just slapped together from other films. There’s no pretense that they are based on original ideas.
I’m talking about cases like the Die Hard series:
The first movie in the series was based on a 1979 novel called Nothing Lasts Forever by Roderick Thorp. This novel was a sequel to a 1966 novel by Thorp called The Detective. The first novel was made into a 1968 movie of the same name which starred Frank Sinatra. I don’t know what precisely happened then, but I suspect that when the novel Nothing Lasts Forever came out Sinatra was not interested. Apparently then, after bouncing around Hollywood for a while, the script for the movie of Nothing Lasts Forever was rewritten for a younger protagonist and the name of the protagonist was changed. It was apparently then offered to Bruce Willis who was just beginning to become well known. The movie was titled Die Hard, so there was no obvious connection to the novel or the previous movie, although the credits acknowledged the source of the movie and all the proper royalties were paid to everyone.
Then the filmmakers needed a sequel to the successful movie Die Hard. They bought the rights to a completely unrelated novel called 58 Minutes by Walter Wager. They changed enough in the script (including, of course, the protagonist’s name) to turn this into a sequel to the first Die Hard movie. This second Die Hard movie was also successful, so they wanted to make another sequel. They bought a script that had been bouncing around Hollywood (which wasn’t based on a novel) called Simon Says. The script was by Jonathan Hensleigh. This script was originally intended to be for Brandon Lee, but he died. It later almost got turned into part of the Lethal Weapon series. Instead it got rewritten into the third movie in the Die Hard series. This third movie was successful, so they needed a fourth movie. Another script that had been bouncing around Hollywood was called WW3.com. It was based on a 1997 article in Wired magazine called “A Farewell to Arms” by John Carlin. This script was rewritten enough to fit into the Die Hard series and became the fourth movie. In all cases, the credits acknowledged the sources of each film and all the proper royalties were paid.
Are there any other examples of film series like this, where each new film was put together from completely unrelated material?