Prompted by complaints about the film's slow pace and incoherence, Mad magazine titled its parody of 2001, "2001 Hours of a Space Idiocy."

The “Star Child” sequence at the end of 2001 partially inspired British Lion to pick up the film rights to Walter Tevis' The Man who Fell to Earth, which they filmed in 1976 with David Bowie as an alien who comes to Earth in search of water for his dying planet. The film has since developed a cult following of its own.

The special effects in 2001 were partly inspired by "Universe," a 1960 Canadian documentary that uses matte painting and animation to visit the planets of the solar system. In fact, Kubrick recruited members of that film's special effects team to work on 2001

In 1984, MGM released a sequel titled 2010: The Odyssey Continues which was promoted with the tag line "The Year We Make Contact." Keir Dullea reprised his role as, apparently, the ghost of Dave Bowman, whose appearances lead a team of U.S. and Soviet astronauts headed by Roy Scheider and Helen Mirren to Jupiter in search of the monolith. In that version, the monolith's purpose was to provide a series of extra suns to save the Earth from war over an energy crisis. Because Kubrick had ordered all models from 2001 destroyed to prevent their use in other films, the new special effects team had to reconstruct the Discovery from photographs.

The idea of a computer developing an ego was nothing new in science fiction literature and film (Gog, 1954, Kronos, 1957, etc.), but thanks to 2001, this concept was introduced to a much larger audience. The idea would be retooled in such films as Demon Seed (1977), in which a computer voiced by Robert Vaughn falls in love with Julie Christie and impregnates her (don't ask!), and the television series Knight Rider (1982-85), in which William Daniels provides the computer voice of the car working with and advising human driver David Hasselhoff.