Is "Free Guy" an American remake of Salvatores' "Nirvana" (1997)?

Nirvana (1997) is arguably the most successful Italian sci-fi movie in history. It topped the box office with a gross of 15 miliardi di lire. It predated The Matrix, as well as Dark City.

I'm glad that even Hollywood is being heavily inspired by Italy's movies, after our recent "hits": The Eurovision Festival (Maneskin); the European League Soccer Cup (against England); Tokyo 2020 (Marcell Jacobs and many others).

"Free Guy" feels like a remake, the concept is 100% identical.

I had not heard of this movie. Looks awesome.

It does seem identical at first glance, and Nirvana seems like a movie I need to see, but the idea of an avatar from a game becoming sentient isn’t necessarily an idea that can’t be thought up by others. It could be coincidental, but I won’t know for sure until I watch both.

I do thank you for bringing Nirvana to my attention, as it feels far more existential and serious then Free Guy will be.

I like Nirvana, but it isn’t a terribly original movie. If you read some 80s cyberpunk fiction, you may recognize many of the tropes that Nirvana and The Matrix carry.

I haven't seen Free Guy yet, but it looks like it just has a similar plotline with a completely different tone. Off the top of my head, World on a Wire is

Since I just saw Free Guy last night, I have not done enough reading to know what it is specifically copied from, but what I liked about it is that, on the one hand it's completely derivative of LOTS of movies, but on the other, it has its own twisted way with those plots and is completely likable.

I have not seen Nirvana, but from the Wiki article, there seem to be a lot of plot elements that are re-used. The delight of the movie is the visuals, which could not have been done in the 70's either in a game or in a movie and and how all of those derivative elements all come together. I also thought it reminded me of The Truman Show and most of the movies I've seen that are adapted from games or that inhabit the game world.

It somewhat reminds me of 1970's westerns in the sense that every plot element that could ever be in a western had been used, so the challenge was to find a new twist on all that. Free Guy really succeeds in that.

I've only seen the trailer but it looked more like a remake of The Lego Movie than anything else.

None of it amounts to a remake. If you've seen as many movies as I have, you can't possibly see any movie without recognizing plot elements from other movies. It reminds you of college English Lit class where your instructor tells you how, in all of the world's novels, there are only about 10 plots. It's like star-crossed lovers in Dr Zhivago, like how many times have you seen THAT plot, set in a different revolution or war, punctuated by a different musical theme?

Often the question comes down to how it's executed, what's the new twist, or in a movie, does it have a different look, or, in the case of Free Guy, how did we get to the conclusion that was obvious to me at the beginning. The fact that I knew how it was going to end didn't ruin the aspect of how they got there, so I liked the movie.