movie/tv difference "borrowing" and plagurism
 

there's homages in movies/tv all the time but when do homages and borrowing become plagurism?

i was watching this zombie movie on syfy cant remember the name but it had the EXACT same ending as dawn on the dead and i'm sitting there like wth how do they get away with that?!

You really can't think of any other pair of movies that end the same? Come on, man.

It's not like endings are owned.

In Amazing Spiderman the teacher said at the end of the movie, "There are only 10 plots in all of fiction."

And its true.

People have been trying to define the edges between homage and infringement forever. Unsurprisingly everyone seems to have a different opinion on where the line is and different tolerances for intellectual and artistic plunder.

I think you have to take each example on a case by case basis – you can’t really say ‘everything fitting X description is homage and everything else is a rip-off’. For example, Tarantino unabashedly takes inspiration from old movies, but a lot of the time he also completely copies dialogue, character names, and shots from older movies, right down to the composition and timing. To be fair, some people definitely have a problem with this, but most people don’t seem to mind least of all movie critics. Conversely, Brian De Palma always got a lot of sh*t for cribbing from Hitchcock; the only difference being that Hitchcock was a legend, and the guys Tarantino borrows from are mostly pretty obscure. I guess the distinction in their mind is that De Palma takes from Hitchcock to make a movie that isn’t as good as one of Hitchcock’s, whereas Tarantino plunders dodgy grindhouse movies and spaghetti westerns to create something greater than the sum of its parts. The action is the same, but like a lot of things in life the consequences depend on how successful you are.

I also think people are willing to look the other way when it suits them. Hong Kong action movie fans used to flip out when Hollywood pinched cool stunt ideas and action beats from Jackie Chan et al, completely ignoring wholesale plagiarism going the other way. I love those movies, but you can’t ignore the ideas, plots and concepts they borrowed from Hollywood, be it Harrold Lloyd or Indiana Jones.

^^^

Plus it's going to happen with anything that earns canon status.
I know this is about tv/movies, but like...the entire fantasy genre is thanks to Tolkien.

The entire plot of the television show Heroes was cribbed, shamelessly I believe, from the plot of the comic Watchmen.