Believe it or not, Comingsoon.net has compiled a collection of films that are based on the same source material. Check out our findings in the gallery below!
Short stories, novels, plays, true stories, even popular toys—they all serve as the source material for countless feature films. Dating back to the very start of the industry, with the works of William Shakespeare and the parables from the Bible being the most-mined works, there’s no way to quantify just how many adaptations there have been throughout the years. Naturally, because of the sheer number of them, there have been all kinds of instances where multiple films rely on the same source material.
What’s interesting about this fact is just how different each film manages to be despite coming from the same story. No matter if it’s two movies based on a real person that employ two very different genres or multiple horror films that rely on the same serial killer for inspiration, these movies are all exceptional for their ability to keep things interesting even if the plot’s familiar.
movies based on same story
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Capote (2005) and Infamous (2006)
Truman Capote is an incredibly important figure to the world of literature and the world of journalism because he managed to merge the two into something called New Journalism—in other words, Capote combined first-person narration with the objective nature of reporting to insert the reporter into the story they’re writing. Capote follows the writer as he works on his book In Cold Blood, and Infamous does the same.
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Dangerous Liaisons (1988) and Valmont (1989)
Released one year apart, Dangerous Liaisons and Valmont come from the 18th-century French novel Les liaisons dangereuses. One comes from director Stephen Frears and the other from Milos Forman, but the former’s is regarded as much better than the latter’s.
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Goodfellas (1990) and My Blue Heaven (1990)
The funny thing about these two films, Goodfellas and My Blue Heaven, is that their respective screenwriters—Nicholas Pileggi and Nora Ephron—were actually married at the time. Both rely on the life of Henry Hill, even though they’re very different films.
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Psycho (1960), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), and The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
Despite being three of the most uniquely influential horror films of their respective decades, Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and The Silence of the Lambs all come from the real-life horror story of Ed Gein. Known as the Butcher of Plainfield and the Plainfield Ghoul, Gein actually did enough terrible things for all three films to mine from his sprees.
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The Magnificent Seven (1960) and A Bug's Life (1998)
This one might be the most jarringly different pairing here, but hear us out: both rely heavily on the story of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, which follows a group of misfits tasked with protecting a small community. At this bare-bones level, The Magnificent Seven and A Bug’s Life owe it all to Kurosawa’s hugely influential samurai movie (A Bug’s Life even credits the filmmaker in the closing crawl).
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Yojimbo (1961), A Fistful of Dollars (1964), and Miller's Crossing (1990)
When Dashiell Hammett wrote The Glass Key in 1931, there’s no way he could have imagined that it’d become a samurai movie, a western, and a mob movie. Akira Kurosawa, Sergio Leone, and the Coen brothers all had plenty of fun with the basic structure of Hammett’s novel, and all managed to craft incredible films as a result.
