I mean, I get that it's nice to be into pop-culture, and I get that it's interesting when you notice things recurring across the vast swathes of things you've watched. Pointing it out to other people validates the amount of time you've invested into watching movies. And to give the article it's due, there are some great examples of actual theft - the author of Voyage of the Space Beagle settling out of court with 20th Century Fox over Alien, and the similarities between A Fistful of Dollars and Yojimbo.
Beyond that though... I'm sorry, but as insane and shocking as this might sound, the majority of the article doesn't really deal with theft. For instance, #10's revelation about an irresistable force meeting an immovable object fails to take into account it's earlier use as a wrestling meme in the 1980s. #5 just compares some fairly commonly recurring (if a little schmaltzy) lines from a male protagonist to a female one, and #12 is at best an interesting piece of prop spotting.
#2 is probably the low point however, claiming that both Dredd and The Raid ripped off Die Hard because they were both set in a tower block. Do we extend that logic to accusing everything from District 13 to Rec of ripping off Towering Inferno just because they're also set in a tower block?
How far back do you go when accusing films of ripping each other off? Granted, there are shot-for-shot 'homages' going on all the time in movies, but when you stray into the territory of accusing one thing of ripping off another because of thematic similarities, you're straying dangerously close to scratching off the veneer of mass-storytelling completely.
I mean, I'm sure most readers are savvy enough to realise that films have tended to adhere to a fairly standardised three act structure since the late 70s. But beyond that, there is also the discovery that unfortunately, there are only seven basic plots:
- Overcoming the Monster,
- Rags to Riches,
- The Quest,
- Voyage and Return,
- Comedy,
- Tragedy and Rebirth.
'Comedy' being an overall catch-all for those stories which have no other narrative but to make you laugh. So if there are only seven basic plots, how many variants of those plots can there logically be?
I mean, if we're pointing the finger to this extent, surely Cracked needs to be aware of Total Film's list of 50 Great Movies Accused of Being Rip-Offs from July 30th last year, or What Culture's '13 Famous Movies You Didn’t Realise Were Shameless Rip-offs' from August of the same year, or even their own article '7 Classic Movies That Are Shameless Ripoffs' from May this year, by a different author.
The truth is, there is a big difference between repetition and inspiration. History repeats itself, and so the events that inspire the minds of writers will similarly repeat themselves - we just have worldwide cultural access to those events. More people seeing those events means more people being inspired by them in their writing, and eventually, cultural output seems to have all these eerie underlying synchronicities.
It's OK to take an overarching theme and set it in a new light. It's fine to look at a previously used setting and try and do something new with it. It's obviously not OK to take the events, universe or movie poster and just change the names then sell it on, but then there's a fine line of ambiguity in exactly how close is 'too close.'
It just seems to me that this article is really reaching in trying to find similarities. Oh, and a lot of their 'lesser well-known' films aren't really that lesser well known. But apart from that, it was almost as interesting as this concluding paragraph is bad.
Sorry.
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