Seven Samurai was a technical and creative watershed that became Japan's highest-grossing movie and set a new standard for the industry. It has remained highly influential, often seen as one of the most "remade, reworked, referenced" films in cinema.[10]
There have been pachinko machines based on Seven Samurai in Japan. Seven Samurai pachinko machines have sold 94,000 units in Japan as of March 2018,[69] equivalent to an estimated $470 million in gross revenue.[69][70]
Remakes
Its influence can be most strongly felt in the Western The Magnificent Seven (1960), a film specifically adapted from Seven Samurai. Director John Sturges took Seven Samurai and adapted it to the Old West, with the samurai replaced by gunslingers. Many of The Magnificent Seven's scenes mirror those of Seven Samurai.[71] The film's title itself comes from the US localized title of Seven Samurai, which was initially released under the title The Magnificent Seven in the United States in 1955.[25] However, in an interview with R. B. Gadi, Kurosawa expressed how "the American copy of The Magnificent Seven is a disappointment, although entertaining. It is not a version of Seven Samurai".[21]: 42 Stephen Prince argues that considering samurai films and Westerns respond to different cultures and contexts, what Kurosawa found useful was not their content but rather he was inspired by their levels of syntactic movement, framing, form and grammar.[72]
The Invincible Six (1970), an American action film directed by Jean Negulesco, has been described as "a knockoff of the Seven Samurai/Magnificent Seven genre set in 1960s Iran."[73]
Battle Beyond the Stars (1980) is an American science fiction film directed by Jimmy T. Murakami and produced by Roger Corman. The film, intended as a "Magnificent Seven in outer space",[74][75] is based on the plots of The Magnificent Seven and Seven Samurai. The movie acknowledges its debt to Seven Samurai by calling the protagonist's homeworld Akir and its inhabitants the Akira.
The plot of Seven Samurai was re-worked for The Seven Magnificent Gladiators (1983), an Italian sword-and-sandal film.
The 2004 video game Seven Samurai 20XX is a re-telling of Seven Samurai in a futuristic setting.
The steampunk anime series Samurai 7 (2004) is based on Seven Samurai.
Some film critics have noted similarities between Pixar's A Bug's Life (1998) and Seven Samurai.[76][77]
Several elements from Seven Samurai are also argued to have been adapted for Star Wars (1977).[78] Plot elements of Seven Samurai are also used in the Star Wars Anthology film Rogue One (2016).[79] The Clone Wars episode "Bounty Hunters" (2008) pays direct homage to Akira Kurosawa by adapting the film's plot, as does The Mandalorian episode "Chapter 4: Sanctuary" (2019).[80]
Director Zack Snyder credited Seven Samurai as being an inspiration for his 2023 space opera film Rebel Moon, which shares the plot element of villagers assembling a team of warriors to defend their farming settlement.[81] Snyder has described the movie as "Seven Samurai in space."[82]
Seven Swords (2005), a Hong Kong wuxia film produced and directed by Tsui Hark, has a plot revolving around seven warriors helping villagers to defend against mercenaries in homage to Seven Samurai.
Cultural impact
Seven Samurai is largely touted as what made the "assembling the team" trope popular in movies and other media. This has since become a common trope in many action movies and heist films.[79] Seven Samurai spawned its own subgenre of "men-on-a-mission" films,[83] also known as the "Seven Samurai formula" where "a team of disparate characters are grouped to undertake a specific mission." The formula has been widely adopted by many films and other media.[4][80] Along with remakes already listed above, other examples of the "Seven Samurai formula" can be seen in films such as Saving Private Ryan (1998),[80] The Dirty Dozen (1967), Star Wars (1977),[4] The Savage Seven (1968),[84] The 13th Warrior (1999), The Expendables, and Avengers,[85] as well as television series such as The A-Team and The Walking Dead.[80]
According to Stephen Prince, the film's "racing, powerful narrative engine, breathtaking pacing, and sense-assaulting visual style" (what he calls a "kinesthetic cinema" approach to "action filmmaking and exciting visual design") was "the clearest precursor" and became "the model for" the Hollywood blockbuster "brand of moviemaking" that emerged in the 1970s.[86] The visuals, plot, dialogue and film techniques of Seven Samurai inspired a wide range of filmmakers, ranging from Steven Spielberg and George Lucas to Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino.[86][87] According to Prince, Kurosawa was "a mentor figure" to an emerging generation of American filmmakers, such as Spielberg and Lucas, who went on to develop the Hollywood blockbuster format in the 1970s.[86]
Elements from Seven Samurai have been borrowed by many films. Examples include plot elements in films such as Three Amigos (1986) by John Landis, borrowed scenes in George Miller's Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), and various elements (including visual elements and the way the action, suspense and movement are presented) in the large-scale battle scenes of films such as The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002), The Matrix Revolutions (2003) and numerous Marvel Studios films.[87][80] The opening action scene (where the hero is introduced in an action scenario unrelated to the rest of the plot) later seen in many action films (such as the pre-title scenes in James Bond films) has origins in Seven Samurai, whose first action scene has Kambei posing as a monk to save a boy from a kidnapper.[80] A visual element from Seven Samurai that has inspired a number of films is the use of rain to set the tone for action scenes; examples of this include Blade Runner (1982), The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, and The Matrix Revolutions.[88] Seven Samurai's film editing technique of cutting on motion and the mentor–student dynamics in the plot (also seen in other Kurosawa films) have also been widely adopted by Hollywood blockbusters (such as Marvel films).[80]
Sholay (1975), a "Curry Western" Indian film written by Salim–Javed (Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar) and directed by Ramesh Sippy, has a plot that was loosely styled after Seven Samurai. Sholay became the most commercially successful Indian film and revolutionized Hindi cinema.[89][90] Later Indian films inspired by Seven Samurai include Mani Ratnam's Thalapathi (1991) and the Hindi film China Gate (1998).[88]
Director Zack Snyder said, "Bruce [Wayne] is having to go out and sort of ‘Seven Samurai' the Justice League together” in the 2021 film Zack Snyder's Justice League.[91] According to Bryan Young of Syfy Wire, the Marvel Cinematic Universe films The Avengers (2012) and Avengers: Infinity War (2018) also owe "a great debt to" Seven Samurai, noting a number of similar plot and visual elements.[92] Other examples of films that reference Seven Samurai include the Australian science fiction film Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981), the American comedy film Galaxy Quest (1999), and the 2016 remake of The Magnificent Seven.[88]
American author Helen DeWitt's debut novel The Last Samurai heavily features Seven Samurai as the title is a reference to the movie and characters within the novel watch and respond to the movie throughout the book.
