When the film was acquired by Bad Robot Productions, producer J. The film 10 Cloverfield Lane was not originally scripted with any connection to Cloverfield. Both are workplace mockumentaries developed by Greg Daniels, featuring satirical humor, and characters being filmed by an in-universe documentary film crew. For example, the show Parks and Recreation is a spiritual successor to The Office. In films and television shows, spiritual successor often describes similar works by the same creator, or starring the same cast.
(2014), it was determined that due to copyright laws, the characters of Holmes and Watson remained under copyright until 2023, making spiritual successors using these characters by name violations of the Doyle estate's copyright. These copyright issues have continued into contempous times: in the case Klinger v.
The name "Herlock Sholmes" became one of the more common variations on this, notably in Maurice Leblanc's Arsène Lupin versus Herlock Sholmes, with the Scholmes character having a personality similar, but not quite exactly like Holmes to further distance potential copyright issues. However, Doyle and his publishers, and since then Doyle's estate, had aggressive enforced copyright on the Holmes character, often requiring authors that were publishing stories to change any use of Holmes' name to something else. Īrthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, published between 18, drew a large number of pastiches from other authors as early as the 1900s to capture the same mystery and spirit as Doyle's writings. The term is also used more broadly to describe a pastiche work, which intentionally evokes similarities to pay homage to other influential works, but is also distinct enough to avoid copyright infringement. Such works may arise when licensing issues prevent a creator from releasing a direct sequel using the same copyrighted characters and names as the original.
In fiction, the term generally refers to a work by a creator which shares similarities to one of their earlier works, but is set in a different continuity, and features distinct characters and settings. Spiritual successors often have similar themes and styles to their source material, but are generally a distinct intellectual property. Follow up work which does not directly continue the canon of its predecessorĪ spiritual successor (sometimes called a spiritual sequel) is a product or fictional work which is similar to, or directly inspired by, another previous work, but (unlike a traditional prequel or sequel) does not explicitly continue the product line or media franchise of its predecessor, and is thus only a successor "in spirit".