A review of the page on which Nighthawks is entered shows (in Edward Hopper's handwriting) that the intended name of the work was actually Night Hawks and that the painting was completed on January 21, 1942.

Bright items: cherry wood counter + tops of surrounding stools; light on metal tanks at rear right; brilliant streak of jade green tiles 3⁄4 across canvas—at base of glass of window curving at corner.

Man night hawk (beak) in dark suit, steel grey hat, black band, blue shirt (clean) holding cigarette.

Barr spoke enthusiastically of Gas, which Hopper had painted a year earlier, and "Jo told him he just had to go to Rehn's to see Nighthawks.

However, according to an article by Jeremiah Moss in The New York Times, that cannot be the location of the diner that inspired the painting because a gas station occupied that lot from the 1930s to the 1970s.

In short, there probably never was a single real-life scene identical to the one that Hopper had created, and if one did exist, there is no longer sufficient evidence to pin down the precise location.

Richard Estes painted a corner store in People's Flowers (1971), but in daylight, with the shop's large window reflecting the street and sky.

Gottfried Helnwein's painting Boulevard of Broken Dreams (1984) replaces the three patrons with American pop culture icons Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe, and James Dean, and the attendant with Elvis Presley.

[16] According to Hopper scholar Gail Levin, Helnwein connected the bleak mood of Nighthawks with 1950s American cinema and with "the tragic fate of the decade's best-loved celebrities.

[19] A large mural recreation of Nighthawks was painted on a defunct Chinese restaurant in Santa Rosa, California until the building was demolished in 2019.

[22] A special issue of Der Spiegel included five brief dramatizations that built five different plots around the painting; one, by screenwriter Christoph Schlingensief, turned the scene into a chainsaw massacre.

[27][28] Hopper was an acknowledged influence on the film musical Pennies from Heaven (1981), for which production designer Ken Adam recreated Nighthawks as a set.

[32] Nighthawks influenced the "future noir" look of Blade Runner; director Ridley Scott said "I was constantly waving a reproduction of this painting under the noses of the production team to illustrate the look and mood I was after".

[35] The painting features in the 2009 movie Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, it comes to life through CGI animation with the characters reacting to events in the outside world.

[49] The theater lighting manufacturer Electronic Theatre Controls has a human-sized scale model of the diner in the lobby of their headquarters in Middleton, Wisconsin.

[51] Typically, these parodies—like Helnwein's Boulevard of Broken Dreams, which became a popular poster[17]—retain the diner and highly recognizable diagonal composition, but replace the patrons and attendant with other characters: animals, Santa Claus and his reindeer, or the respective casts of The Adventures of Tintin or Peanuts.