This is along the lines of the “seven universal plots” theory. What stories, movies, tv shows were based on earlier similar stories? The more far-out the association, the better.
In Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, a town enjoys robust tourism from its healing spring waters. A doctor discovers dangerous bacteria in the water - this at a time when few people believed in bacteria. He spreads the news, thinking he will be a hero for saving the town. Instead he is hated for destroying the tourism.
Substitute Roy Scheider for the doctor and a big shark for the bacteria, and you have Jaws.
Certainly Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad being moved to the middle of the Vietnam War and becoming Apocalypse Now should count. King Lear reset in feudal Japan as Ran would be another great example.
“Harm Done” by Ruth Rendell takes an idea from Josephine Tey’s “The Franchise Affair”- and even makes a reference. Admittedly, the whole story isn’t based on it, but still. It was the first thing that popped into my head.
Also, I guess you could say that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Lost World” kind of inspired Michael Crichton’s book of the same name. What with the dinosaurs and all.
Dashiel Hammet’s Red Harvest, about a detective who cleans up a town full of gangsters and corrupt police in the 1920’s America because they pissed him off becomes Yojimbo about a samurai with a shady past who plays rival gangs of thugs against eachother in Feudal Japan. From Yojimbo we get A Fistful of Dollars, about an old west gunslinger who is basically amoral, and motivated by profit. From A Fistful of Dollars we get The Sword and the Sorceress, which is a bizzare fantasy remake, right down to the poncho, but substituting six daggers for six shooters. Also from A Fistful of Dollars we get Last Man Standing, which brings the story back into the twenties, but now with a gangland gunslinger instead of a detective who is motivated by a kind of bitter gallantry rather than by money or honor.
If anyone knows of an instance of this story that dates further back than Hammett, I’d love to hear about it.
Turn Montagues into the Jets and have the Capulets become the Sharks (or is it the other way around?), and thus Romeo and Juliet becomes West side Story