Did Star Trek inspire the Purge film and television franchise?

Star Trek's inspiration really is pretty revolutionary, eh? Even after 58 years of stories, Star Trek still finds a way to inspire all sorts of things. Recently, the concept of the film series "The Purge" came back into the social zeitgeist due to some rather unfortunate reasons. While we're not going to dive into the deeper aspects as the "why" it's recently trending, what we will point out is that The Purge isn't an original idea.

Not truly. Someone recently pointed out on Twitter that The Purge is nothing more than a follow-up idea to the Star Trek: The Original Series episode, The Return of the Archons. In the episode, the crew arrives on the planet Beta III, just ahead of their annual Festival.

During the Festival, the denizens of Beta III were to engage in violent or debaucherous activities for 12 hours, and not doing so would be a problem. While some were legally excluded from the event, most were forced to participate. Making it a shocking sight to behold for the crew of the USS Enterprise.

Not so shocking, this concept would later be turned into a film called The Purge, which featured Ethan Hawke as the star. It would be unfair to say that the Star Trek episode directly inspired the film, as there are some rather noticeable differences, but Star Trek did apparently inspire some of the film if not the general premise.

According to CBR, writer-director James DeMonaco pulled directly from the Star Trek episode when crafting his vision of the story. Apparently, DeMonaco would watch classic episodes of Star Trek with his father, and the premise of The Return of the Archons would be the inspiration for his hit film series.

While Star Trek may influence current and future science fiction properties, let's remember to keep such ideas strictly fiction. As this would be a truly terrible idea to see become a reality.