Originally published at: Netflix sued: Squid Game accused of copying Bollywood film, Luck - Boing Boing
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Somehow I believe there is a Hollywood trope that boils down to rich jerks betting on the outcome on plebs behavior.
Titles that come to mind are:
Rat Race (2001)
Dinner for Schmucks (2010)
Trading Places (1983)
This was my quick take, and I am sure there are plenty more.
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I wouldn’t be surprised if Squid Game borrowed inspiration from the previous film but in most cases “knock-offs” don’t rise to the legal standard of copyright infringement.
There’s a whole subgenre of films (the “Mockbuster”) built around riding the coattails of other people’s movies as closely as possible without running afoul of IP laws.
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This trope is at least 50 years old.
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Hollywood got it from Richard Connell back in 1924:
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Now I just want to see the film “Luck”.
And Deadly Game, actually.
Oh, and Dinner for Schmucks - never heard of that one.
Squid Game was very well done, felt very new at the time, although I know pretty much every story has been done before in one form or another.
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Squid Game has also been compared to the Japanese manga/television/film franchise Liar Game.
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I’d agree these movies and Alice in the Boarderlands are in the same genera, but the details are pretty different in important plot ways. In Squid Games - they are decidedly NOT lucky before they are kidnapped. in Alice, it’s a supernatural copy of earth.
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There’s also the manga Kaiji which started serialization in 1996, the anime was made in 2017. The plot is pretty much Squid Game but more overly melodramatic in the best of ways.
It’s basically a loser with a gambling problem, gets on the mob’s radar and they offer him a deal with clear his debts if he participates in a deadly gambling tournament. Following stoyrlines ramps up the stakes as he keeps getting involved in deadlier circumstances.
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“The Gamesters of Triskelion,” Star Trek, January 5, 1968.
I bet 100 quatloos that Netflix will win this lawsuit!
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I’m doubtful. It doesn’t seem like that original a premise (there are so many “people play dangerous games” plots, and you’re going to see similar stock trope characters in a lot of tv shows/movies). E.g. the manga Battle Royale, Liar Game and Gambling Apocalypse: Kaiji, which the writer explicitly cited as influences.
The only real coincidence here is that the Squid Game writer originally wrote it as a movie script in 2009, the year Luck came out (but that also means it could have been written before the movie was released). I also wonder if Bollywood movies even have any penetration in South Korea. The existence of the internet means anything could theoretically be available anywhere, but I don’t get any sense that there’s much awareness of Bollywood in South Korea, unlike China, where, pre-internet at least, they used to be a major part of the media environment.
The writer of Squid Game talked about how he wrote the script after reading a bunch of manga, specifically mentioning a few, including that one, so he’s pretty open about his influences.
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Good to know, and frankly it doesn’t bother me one way or the other. But Kaiji is a pretty good read if you’re into that genre of manga, so him giving credit to it as an influence is a net positive to me.
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must be at least dozens of thematic variations out there. germany, 1970;
the book is from 1958;
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Oh god, I’d forgotten that Jesse Ventura was in that…
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Choreography by Paula Abdul! 
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Wait! Really?
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Seems like it, doing a cursory search and seeing references in different places that she did the choreo
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I was thinking of:
The US remake flopped hard, apparently.
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Yeah I remember reading that story for a high school English class. And you’re right, all of the other examples people are mentioning are just derivatives of that basic theme.
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