One early draft of the Metropolis screenplay ended with Freder piloting a rocket to the stars as means of escaping the city of the future. Eventually, Fritz Lang cut that ending, but kept ideas from it for his later film Frau im Mond (1928).

Lang was shocked to discover that Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels were great fans of Metropolis. They were so impressed, in fact, that they offered to overlook Lang's Jewish family background and declare him an honorary Aryan so he could run the German film industry. That invitation helped push Lang into fleeing Germany.

Albert Speer used the film as inspiration in designing the Nuremberg rally. Leni Riefenstahl's documentary on that rally, Triumph of the Will (1935), also draws on Lang's film.

For a 1936 re-issue of the film, UFA cut it to 91 minutes. They also re-issued that print, with English subtitles in the U.S. and England. That is the version originally held in the Museum of Modern Art's film library.

Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster named the city in which he lived after the film.

A Japanese manga inspired by the film appeared in 1949. It became an anime feature in 2001 under the original feature's title.

Rotwang inspired the look of the title character played by Peter Sellers in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964).

The design for C-3PO in Star Wars (1977) was modeled on the robot Maria in Metropolis.

Queen included footage from the film in the 1983 video for their hit "Radio Ga Ga."

For a 1984 version of the film, Giorgio Morodor created a new score, including songs performed by such prominent rock artists as Freddie Mercury, Pat Benatar, Bonnie Tyler and Adam Ant. This version met with decidedly mixed reviews, with some critics hailing it as a new vision of a great classic and others calling it a desecration. One major issue with the naysayers was that the Morodor version is only 87 minutes long, even though current prints ran 115 minutes.

Another 1980s television version is scored to Steven Reich's "Music for 18 Musicians."

In 1989, a musical version of Metropolis opened at the Piccadilly Theatre in London with music by Joe Brooks and lyrics and book by Dusty Hughes. Cast members included Brian Blessed as John Freeman (changed from Fredersen), Judy Kuhn as Maria and her robot double, here named Futura, Graham Bickley as Freeman's son, now Steven, and Jonathan Adams as mad scientist Warner. The musical has never played Broadway. It was revived in Luneburg, Germany, in 1989, Cicero, IL, in 1990, Salem, OR, in 2002 and Seattle in 2010.

The video for Whitney Houston's 1993 "Queen of the Night" includes footage from Metropolis. Huston's costume for the video resembles the design for the robot Maria.

Over time over one quarter of the footage from the original print was thought to have been lost.