37 Movie Ideas That Sprouted From the Weirdest Possible Inspirations

Inspiration can come from anywhere. We mean anywhere!
37 Movie Ideas That Sprouted From the Weirdest Possible Inspirations

Not that we’d have any idea, but we hear from creative people that they get inspiration from all kinds of crazy places. 

See that? We don’t even have an idea about how people get ideas. How did we ever get jobs here? 

Anywho, much more creative minds than ours found ideas for their movies in some pretty strange places. Here’s some windows into some those strange places…

Forrest Gump

CRACKED.COM Movie: Forrest Gump Inspiration: Norman Rockwell's art Director Robert Zemeckis used the work of the classic American painter to shape the look and feel of Greenbow, the fictional Alabama town where Forrest grew up. Rockwell's painting Girl with Black Eye was also recreated in the scene where Gump waits for his mother outside the principal's office (minus the black eye).

Kong: Skull Island

CRACKED COM Movie: Kong: Skull Island Inspiration: Shadow Of The Colossus While Pokémon and Predator also served as inspiration, it was SotC that hit home for director Jordan Vogt-Roberts: It's such a beautiful thing to have a boss fight where you feel sad after you've killed the boss. The colossi in those games have such a slow, melancholy, morose quality to them. I think and I hope that Kong has a similar vibe in the film. That, and finding out what would happen if you add colossi-like monsters to Apocalypse Now.

Pan’s Labyrinth

CRACKED.COM Movie: Pan's Labyrinth Inspiration: Francisco Goya Director Guillermo del Toro drew a lot of inspiration from Goya's work in the film, but none more so than the scene with the Pale Man. There is a scene in which the Pale Man bites the heads off the fairies. That comes straight from Goya's painting of Saturn devouring his son. Or what we like to call, Things Nightmares Are Made Of.

Dr. Strange

37 Movie Ideas That Sprouted From the Weirdest Possible Inspirations

The Grand Budapest Hotel

Movie: The Grand Budapest Hotel Inspiration: Austro-Hungarian and Prussian photochrom pictures. Director Wes Anderson used photochrom pictures (black-and-white photographs that have been colorized) to create the fictitious Republic of Zubrowska. The Library of Congress's photochrom collection includes all these commercially produced pictures showing views of Europe around the turn of the century. Zubrowska is also the name of a Polish Bison Grass vodka. CRACKED.COM

The Dark Knight

CRACKED COM Movie: The Dark Knight Inspiration: The art of Francis Bacon Christopher Nolan based the Joker's makeup on Bacon's work: I wound up taking a book of Bacon paintings and showing them a lot of the different distortions and the way the paint would run together and the colors would mix. That debunks the whole some kid did it theory.

The Devil Wears Prada

Anna Wintour didn't inspire Meryl Streep's character in The Devil Wears Prada. Clint Eastwood did. Streep based Miranda Priestly's voice on Eastwood, saying that he never, ever, ever raises his voice and everyone has to lean in to listen, and he is automatically the most powerful person in the room. She also used the late director Mike Nichols' sarcastic and dry sense of humor to shape her iconic character. CRACKED.COM

Old School

BRAD PITT EDWIRD NORTON I FUNCHER FiLM MIS CHI AVHT M SOAP CITA en ALE KOR a - PA DE REE - - ла US NG SHIME ... TOTAL 10 - CENTE - C KA amount Old School is just a comedy take on Fight Club. Writer and director Todd Phillips says he was thinking of Fight Club throughout writing the whole screenplay, and it shows: a ton of scenes are ripped straight from Fight Club with a minor twist or two. CRACKED.COM

Logan

James Mangold's father helped inspire Logan's ending. His father, a painter, made two series of paintings that explored the plus and the x symbols, respectively, so Mangold has a very ingrained sense of the relationship of the cross and the X --and that's part of what inspired him to make Laura rotate the grave marker, turning it from a cross into an X. CRACKED.COM

Bombshell

One of Bombshell's more gross anecdotes is from the original reporting. It's the one about a female employee who is said to have come from a meeting with Roger Ailes with her nose and chin makeup gone. CRACKED.COM

Cars

Mater from Cars is based on an actual person in Sherrills Ford, NC. KEEP NO TRES NE ADEL His name is Douglas Mater Keever, a construction superintendent who's the self-appointed mayor - the Cars director met him on a research trip. CRACKED.COM

Black Panther

Steven Spielberg's Lincoln influenced Black Panther. The challenge scene with M'Baku and T'Challa was directly inspired by it -- Ryan Coogler says he liked how Spielberg made political conversations animated and engaging. CRACKED.COM

Lord of the Rings

CRACKED.COM The Ents in THE LORD OF THE RINGS were inspired by Shakespeare. No, there aren't talking, walking trees in Macbeth - and that pissed off a young J. R. R. Tolkien, who expected that the prophecy about the woods coming against Macbeth's castle became literally true. So years later, he wrote that into his own book.

The Purge

CRACKED.COM Movie: The Purge Inspiration: A drunk driver (and a vengeful wife) Director James DeMonaco tells the story of the time a drunk driver almost killed him and his wife by cutting them off on the road. They confronted the driver, but he showed no remorse. My wife was so worked up over this guy's attitude... and said, 'Wouldn't it be great if we all had one free one a year?' I'm like, 'That's so fucked-up, honey,' but it stayed with me. Now there's your movie.

Almost Famous

Cameron Crowe's Oscar-winning movie, Almost Famous, is heavily based on his escapades as a GRAGKED.COM teenage rock journalist in the '70s. Just like the film's William Miller, Crowe was hired by Rolling Stone to travel with bands like Led Zeppelin, the Eagles, and Lynyrd Skynyrd. And, uh, he really did lose his virginity to a bunch of groupies.

Us

Us came from a persistent fear that Jordan Peele had been having. He'd imagine seeing his own doppelganger on the subway, across the platform, and he would smile at Peele. That was the seed for the movie. CRACKED.COM

Barry Lyndon

CRACKED.COM Barry Lyndon While the movie doesn't recreate any articular painting, it does draw a lot of its visuals from 18th- century British artists such as Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds, and William Hogarth.

Heat

The iconic Robert De Niro shot in Heat was inspired by a 1967 painting. To director Michael Mann, the painting showed somebody who was involved in some life of aggression and action and yet contrast within the mental state because here was a moment of inner loneliness, so he basically made it a shot. CRACKED.COM

101 Dalmations

101 Dalmatians was inspired by a real-life Cruella de Vil-type remark. Disney 101 DALMATIANS Writer Dodie Smith had nine Dalmatians, and a friend of hers once said Those dogs would make a lovely fur coat --which ended up inspiring a novel (that later turned into a movie). CRACKED.COM

Luca

Pixar's Luca was actually inspired by the style of Hayao Miyazaki movies. The village where the movie takes place, Portorosso, is even an homage to a Miyazaki movie - Porco Rosso. CRACKED .COM

Aquaman 2

Aquaman 2 takes its inspiration from a campy '60s Italian horror flick. The movie is Planet of the Vampires, and director James Wan said, You can take the boy out of horror, but you can never take the horror out the boy. CRACKED .COM

Big Trouble in Little China

Big Trouble In Little China was heavily inspired by the 1980s movie Zu. Its full name is Zu: Warriors From The Magic Mountain, and it's a Hong Kong action movie that made John Carpenter get started on Big Trouble In Little China. CRACKED.COM

Birds of Prey

Quentin Tarantino's movies kind of ended up inspiring Birds of Prey. NEW Director Cathy Yan said that the structure of the film was a bit like Pulp Fiction meets Rashomon. CRACKED COM

Midsommar

Midsommar is partly modelled on the 1981 breakup movie Modern Romance. Director Ari Aster was going through a bad breakup when they pitched Midsommar to him, and he wanted to make it partly a breakup movie. CRACKED .COM

Dune

Denis Villeneuve was specifically inspired by Star Wars Tatooine scenes for Dune. As he put it, When I saw the very first 'Star Wars' in 1977 my favorite scenes were the ones that felt the most natural. The one when we see the droids at the beginning - there was something about the strength of nature. CRACKED.COM

The Ant-Man & The Wasp

A bunch of particular 1980s movies inspired The Ant-Man & The Wasp. Director Peyton Reed said that the ticking clock plot came directly from After Hours and Midnight Run. CRACKED GOM

The Eternals

DC's Man of Steel ended up directly inspired Marvel's The Eternals. adidas The Eternal Ikaris is basically a riff on Superman, and director Chloe Zhao said that Of all modern interpretations of Superman, this is Zack Snyder's with 'Man Of Steel' which inspired me the most because he approached this myth in an authentic and very real way. CRACKED.COM

Avengers: Infinity War

Avengers: Infinity War was partly based on 1990s heist movies, it turns out. Co-director Joe Russo said that Structurally, with this first film, Avengers 3, we've been using the smash-n-grab '90s heist films, so there's a real urgency to the film. CRACKED.COM

Star Wars

There'd be no Millennium Falcon without the WWII bomber that bombed Hiroshima. The B-29 Superfortress, used in and Japan, had a greenhouse-like cockpit that pretty clearly inspired the Millennium Falcon. CRACKED.COM

Save the Green Planet!

A Korean movie called Save the Green Planet! inspired Midsommar. The movie is about a rich pharma exec who gets kidnapped by a deranged guy who thinks the exec is actually a hostile alien, and that's just the start. CRACKED.COM

The Batman

1974's Chinatown was an inspiration for the Robert Pattinson Batman movie. The movie was inspired by 70s, street-grounded stories in general, but Chinatown was a key one, said director Matt Reeves. CRACKED.COM

Hunger Games

Hunger Games: Catching Fire was heavily influenced by Breaking Bad. Director Francis Lawrence binge-watched the show while making the movie, and its cliffhangers inspired him to end his own movie on a cliffhanger. CRACKED.COM

The Dark Knight

The 1953 western Shane played a big role in shaping The Dark Knight. The reason? The evil, in particular, in that film was so evil. There had never been anything quite like it, explained Christopher Nolan. CRACKED.COM

Frozen 2

An ancient way of calling cattle home inspired a song in Frozen 2. The unnamed voice that calls to Elsa in Into the Unknown draws on the art of kulning -- a way of calling cattle in which each herd would have its own song. CRACKED.COM

Johnny Depp

Johnny Depp's Willy Wonka (from the 2005 movie) is based on a U.S. president. I imagined what George Bush would be like incredibly stoned. And, thus was born my version of Willy Wonka, he explained once. CRACKED.COM

The LEGO Movie

Batman and Chewbacca interact in The LEGO Movie because of a kid's play. Co-creator Chris Miller saw his son put LEGO Batman and Chewbacca in the same spaceship, so he thought he could do that in the movie. CRACKED.COM

Once Upon A Time in Hollywood

The bromance in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was based on a real one. Burt Reynolds and his stuntman Hal Needham were even closer -- it was the closest relationship I've ever seen in that business, a mutual colleague said. CRACKED.COM

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