Movies You Didn't Know Were Spinoffs

Even before our current era of film, in which intricately interconnected "cinematic universes" link so many movies together as if they're one gigantic, super-long film released in installments over many years, Hollywood has creatively used one successful movie as a jumping-off point for more successful movies. Sequels have been commonplace for decades, and prequels really came into fashion after Star Wars introduced audiences to a pre-Vader Anakin Skywalker.

There's also the relatively rare (to film) concept of spinoffs. It's extremely commonplace in TV to take a popular character from a series and build a new one around them — Frasier originated with Cheers and The Simpsons began as a feature on The Tracey Ullman Show, for example. It happens in movies, too. The Scorpion King is a spinoff of the Brendan Fraser-starring The Mummy movies, and those Minions from Despicable Me proved so popular that they got their own blockbuster cartoon. Here are some other movies that you may have forgotten about that are spinoffs of other, more famous films.

In the 2000s, Canadian filmmakers Jason Eisener and John Davies conceived a movie called Hobo With a Shotgun, a re-creation of ultra-violent, super-cheap '80s action movies. The plot: a rail-hopping drifter (a hobo, if you will), gets caught up in a crime family dispute, which at one point involves a boss' evil sons setting a bus full of kids on fire. Investors pulled funding because of that scene (despite being cool with a sexually deviant Santa, a tentacled monster, and other wildly insane elements), so Eisener was back to square one.

Fortunately for him, in 2007, Robert Rodriguez set up a contest to promote Grindhouse, a movie-going experience that aimed to make viewers feel like they were in a low-budget 1970s exploitation movie house. Along with two full-length movies (Rodriguez's Planet Terror and Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof), it also included trailers for non-existent movies put together by Eli Roth, Edgar Wright, and Rob Zombie. The contest urged filmmakers to make their own fake trailers. Eisener spent just $150 on his Hobo With a Shotgun trailer... and he won. It became a viral hit, and was screened as part of Grindhouse during its Canadian theatrical release. All that attention helped Eisener secure the funding to make a real, full-length Hobo With a Shotgun. With '80s movie hero Rutger Hauer starring as the unnamed Hobo, the film immediately became a cult hit.

The delightfully over-the-top street-racing (and eventually globe-trotting) franchise The Fast and the Furious didn't really gel until the fourth movie or so, but filmmakers toyed around with a lot of ideas before then. For example, the third film barely involves the series' recurring characters. Set in Tokyo, it takes place in the same universe as the other furiously fast movies, but occurs after the events of 2013's Fast and Furious 6. Weirdly, it's also a semi-spinoff of the 2002 drama Better Luck Tomorrow. Justin Lin directed both films. 

That movie, about a straitlaced high school student who descends into a world of crime, included a character named Han (Sung Kang), already grizzled and hard-living as a teenager who's often depicted smoking and delivering beatings. A few years later, Sung Kang reunited with Lin on Tokyo Drift, once again playing Han. He'd apparently been a bit farther down the rough path he was already on, and he wound up as part of the films' "family" of criminals.

The funny and surprisingly touching Forgetting Sarah Marshall was a double revelation. Up to that point, star and co-writer Jason Segel was known solely for acting, playing sweet but goofy guys on TV shows like Freaks and Geeks and How I Met Your Mother. This movie launched his writing career — in 2011, he co-wrote and starred in the franchise-reviving The Muppets. The other breakout success of Sarah Marshall: Russell Brand. Already a hugely popular comedian and TV personality in his native U.K., Brand charmed American audiences as Aldous Snow, a pretentious, libidinous rock star with whom the titular Sarah Marshall (Kristen Bell) ends up after leaving Segel's character. 

Brand was so charming as this ridiculous, Mick Jagger-esque libertine that Segel's Forgetting Sarah Marshall co-writer Nicholas Stoller wrote and directed an Aldous Snow movie. Get Him to the Greek hit theaters in 2010, and centered on an intern (Jonah Hill) at an L.A. record company tasked with wrangling Snow and ensuring he shows up for a concert date at the Greek Theater. It earned $60 million at the box office, virtually the same amount as Forgetting Sarah Marshall.