There’s nothing movie producers love more than a formula that prints money. Once a movie rakes in premium cash at the box office, you can bet your last dollar that 10 more producers are rushing into production with a plotline similar to that movie, and they’re usually shameless about it. It’s not always a bulletproof endeavour because some of these copycats have been straight-up embarrassing.
Beyond making the big bucks at the box office, the five films on this list spawned copycats and Hollywood can’t seem to stop making them. What’s special about this list is that some of them actually gave the prototype a run for its money, proving a formula could work more than once. But none of them could steal the crown from the movies that started it all.
1. The Blair Witch Project (1999)
Found footage used to be one of the horror genre’s biggest fads. Fans of the genre were particularly attracted to the whole illusion (often created by the grainy textures and shaky camera work) that the terrifying events in those footages actually happened. That intense desire to see unedited reality started with The Blair Witch Project. The film features three film students, a camcorder, and a whole lot of screaming in the Maryland woods. That was the whole recipe. But somehow this grainy mess made $250 million from a budget of $60,000.
Most studio execs worth their salt did the math and instantly went to work replicating the formula. Cloverfield threw a giant lizard into the mix in 2008, and Quarantine showed up with zombies the same year, because why not. Paranormal Activity followed in 2009, but swapped the woods for a boring bedroom and creaky door, and turned out to be the one that really nailed the playbook. Before long, however, found footage went from “oh wow, this is terrifying” to “oh great, another shaky camera movie.” The magic faded fast.
2. Jaws (1975)
You might think that one movie about a big, angry killer shark would be enough to satisfy Hollywood’s hunger. But no, Steven Spielberg accidentally created the blockbuster of the summer, and Hollywood’s response was basically to point the camera at any animal with teeth and call it a movie. Grizzly replaced the park with a bear in 1976, because apparently national parks needed their own menace too. Orca went the revenge route with a killer whale hunting down the guy who messed with his family, which is kind of sad if you think about it. Piranha just multiplied the problem, introducing a school of small angry fish chewing through a summer camp.
It got so ridiculous that they actually gave it a name: “sharksploitation.” None of these came close to Jaws, obviously, but they didn’t have to. Small town, scary animal, one grizzled dude in a boat: the cheap formula and easy money were just too enticing to ignore. The real irony is that Jaws did more damage to sharks than any movie should probably be allowed to: shark hunting spiked hard in the years after its release, and populations still haven’t recovered. Peter Benchley, who wrote the novel it’s based on, spent his life apologizing for it and campaigning for shark conservation. Spielberg has said the same.
3. Taken (2008)
Very few people, perhaps even Liam Neeson himself, expected the veteran actor to become an action star at 55. He was mostly known as a respected dramatic actor, the kind who picked up Oscar nominations, not the kind who threw punches. All that changed when Taken dropped in 2008. One phone call and a very specific set of threats later, and suddenly he’s the guy everyone ran to when they needed someone to punch first and ask questions later. Neeson kept the train rolling himself with Unknown, The Grey, and Non-Stop, just to prove the formula wasn’t a fluke.
Then Kevin Costner got his own version with 3 Days to Kill, which was basically Neeson with a Southern drawl and a cancer diagnosis for extra sympathy points. The whole genre boiled down to one simple pitch: find a serious, weathered actor, hand him a gun, and let him put the fear of God in criminals for about two hours. Almost two decades later, Neeson is still making these movies. Absolution came out in 2024 with pretty much the same template: a guy with a dark past tries to reconnect with his daughter while punching his way through criminals. The appetite for old-man Neeson movies just refuses to die.
4. The Hunger Games (2012)
“May the odds be in your favour” became more than just another catchphrase. It became a business model for a franchise that opened the floodgates to every studio with a young-adult dystopian trilogy gathering dust on the shelf. Divergent showed up in 2014 with its own factions and another reluctant chosen girl. The Maze Runner arrived the same year with boys instead of girls because that was “different” somehow. The Giver tried to cash in too, all moody and color-drained.
Most of these franchises fizzled out by the third movie, choking on their own sequels and boring audiences to tears. The entire YA dystopian wave crashed really hard by the end of that decade. People moved on to superheroes and other more attractive viewing pleasures. For anyone who wants to relive that era, The Hunger Games is still the one to rewatch.
5. Die Hard (1988)
There’s still a debate on whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie, and it will probably outlive us all. But the one thing that no one can dispute is the fact that it set the pace for several movies about a guy who finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, surrounded by heavily armed bad guys, and forced to rely on nothing more than his own wits, resourcefulness, and sheer refusal to die.
Speed moved the whole thing to a bus; Under Siege felt a battleship was the best place to do the same thing, and even had Steven Seagal doing the whole “I’m a tough guy” routine (spoiler: he wasn’t). Sudden Death put it in a hockey arena, and Olympus Has Fallen dragged it all the way to the White House. The whole thing became such a punchline that “Die Hard on a _____” became an industry shorthand, and that says everything about how bulletproof that original formula was.
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