Deep Space Nine ripped off Babylon 5. Fans love them both, because instead of one sci-fi political drama on a space station, we got two!

You’re going to get into the blurry distinction between a ripoff and a tribute or an homage.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier has a lot of Three Days of the Condor, but is that a ripoff, or an homage?

Ditto Star Wars and Hidden Fortress.

Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More were uncredited remakes of Yojimbo and Sanjuro, and as I recall Kurosawa was pretty annoyed, so that probably counts as a ripoff.

Oreo cookies came out four years after Hydrox cookies, and I’d say they surpassed the original.

Is Rick and Morty a cheating answer?

A lot of people thinks Shakespeare was pretty good

Rent is based on La Boheme, it never tried to hide it. The character have almost identical names and they swapped tuberculosis with AIDS and it’s 100 years later.

I always wondered if La Boheme hit as hard in the 1890’s as Rent did in the 1990’s.

I think there’s also an important distinction to be made here, especially for many of these examples.

Ripoff - “a usually cheap exploitive imitation”

Homage - “something that shows respect or attests to the worth or influence of another”

I think many of the examples of “good ones” would likely be homages, rather than ripoffs. Although thats not to say, some ripoffs can’t be good on their own too.

F. W. Murnau wanted to make a cinema adaptation of ‘Dracula’, but didn’t get the permission. So he shrugged, changed some details, and made the 1922 ‘Nosferatu’.

Guess what, the original Dracula wasn’t affected by sunlight. That whole trope of the vampire genre comes from ‘Nosferatu’.

The Wizard of the Emerald City and it’s series from Alexander Melentyevich Volkov. The first story was a nearly 100 % ripoff of The Wizard of Oz and later books also contain some ideas from the original stories from Baum, but Volkov also created a lot on his own in the sequels. And I love the world he created. I especially like that villains were portrayed in a manner that made sense. While there also were some archetypical “I’m capital E Evil” the character of Urfin was fascinating to me as a child, as it was one of the first instances of a multidimensional charactersi experienced as child. He was an overly ambitious but smart person in a fairy tale village where everybody else was content with their simple life. And that discrepancy was the start of his road to villainhood.

The Magnificent 7 and A Fistful of Dollars are just Seven Samurai and Yojimbo but westerns.

After Michael Crichton’s Westworld bombed, one of his friends recommend he explore the same themes with dinosaurs instead, so he wrote Jurassic Park.

Willy’s Wonderland is a way better Five Nights at Freddie’s than the actual Five Nights at Freddie’s.

Not quite the same, but: more than a few classic films are remakes. The 1959 ‘Ben-Hur’ is a remake of the 1925 film, which itself was the second cinema adaptation of the novel, after the 1907 film.

Didn’t twilight start as a fan fiction?

Polar was ripoff of the Keanu Reeves movies.

The Lion King is basically Hamlet with animals.