In the golden age of Hollywood in the 1940s, acerbic wit and sometime movie scribe Dorothy Park famously quipped: “The only ‘ism’ in which Hollywood believes is plagiarism.”

As a hungry dream machine constantly in search of material to feed the demands of audiences it’s no surprise that Wikipedia’s category page of “films involved in plagiarism controversies” is extensive and covers films from across the world and the history of movies — from Avatar (basically Dances with Wolves with blue aliens instead of Native Americans) to The Lion King (liberally inspired in story and animation style by a 1960 anime series Kimba the White Lion) to The Terminator (suspiciously similar to a short story by notoriously litigious sci-fi author Harlan Ellison) and Zoolander (a slapstick mangling of Brett Easton Ellis’ paranoid male model political conspiracy novel Glamorama). ..

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