one time there were two magician movies

the world's end (2013)
this is the end (2013)

this might have been mentioned in the 77* "skipped" messages.

*ayo!

True Romance (1993)
Natural Born Killers (1994)

Antz was a ripoff of A Bug's Life that Katzenberg rushed through production when he left Disney.

Some of these are ideas that Hollywood does every few years and it just so happened that two studios gave two of them similar release dates. often happens with disaster movies.

True Romance (1993)
Natural Born Killers (1994)

Past Midnight (1991)
Reservoir Dogs (1992)
True Romance (1993)
It's Pat (1994)
Four Rooms (1995)
From Dusk Till Dawn (1996)
Jackie Brown (1997)

True Romance (1993)
Natural Born Killers (1994)

There was also another road movie about a serial killer couple that also had juliette lewis

Kalifornia (1993)

One I happened across:

A Woman Called Sada Abe (1975)
In The Realm Of The Senses (1976)

Had never heard of the earlier film before I picked it up at the library this weekend

Colony (2009)
Vanishing of the Bees (2009)
Queen of the Sun: What Are the Bees Telling Us? (2010)

All docs

Re the swing set similar scenes & the already mentioned Dark City: Dark City (1998) & Requiem for a Dream (1999) both feature Jennifer Connolly in very similar recurring dream/visionary scenes on a pier, apparently just a strange coincidence.

Dark City also has elements reproduced with some similarity in the Buffy episode Hush (1999).

Nicotine Bees (2010) lol

i kind of love this phenomenon

Platoon (1986)
Full Metal Jacket (1987)
Good Morning, Vietnam (1987)
Hamburger Hill (1987)

There are shitloads more from the 80's Nam boom, but these were the Oscar bothering type ones that ran concurrently.

― calzino, Saturday, March 26, 2016 11:25 AM (3 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i remember this run weirding me out when i was a kid

Leviathan (2012)
Leviathan (2014)

.. and also Leviathan (1989)

I realize not entirely apt, but ...

Showgirls (1995)
Striptease (1996)

More recently:

Experimenter (2015)
Stanford Prison Experiment (2015)

Batman v Superman (2016)
Captain America: Civil War (2016)

both movies with franchise superheroes punching each other

That will be like 30% of what Hollywood produces next year.

Kramer vs kramer (whenever)
Super troopers (whenever)

Both have casts and credits and everything

American Ninja (1985)
Gymkata (1985)

http://www.cracked.com/video_19950_6-bizarrely-specific-trends-in-hollywood-history.html

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7315484/
&
a quiet place

the world's end (2013)
this is the end (2013)

Also: Rapture-Palooza (2013), an Anna Kendrick vehicle in the same vein, co-starring This Is The End's Craig Robinson as The Devil.

existenz and gattaca

At the time many people lumped Existenz and Matrix together, since they came out in the same year, they're both mostly set in virtual reality, and both ask questions about the nature of reality. Though obviously their approach to VR is very different.

Churchill (2017)
Darkest Hour (2017)

Also (hopefully not already mentioned above) I just saw the documentary on the Marquis de wavrin, Belgian explorer & ethnographer who filmed indigenous tribes in South America in the early c20, & it reminded me that a couple of years ago we had:

Embrace of the serpent (2015)
Lost city of z (2016)

https://www.slashfilm.com/1992s-two-columbus-movies-head-to-head/

I haven't seen Lost City Of Z yet buy I can't even fathom how it might be similar to Embrace Of The Serpent

Only in subject matter really, they’re quite different otherwise

Embrace of the serpent (2015) = Herzog
Lost city of z (2016) = David Lean

Tuomas, have you seen The Thirteenth Floor? Also 1999 and even closer to The Matrix in subject matter.

I was quite enjoying embrace of the serpent until the derivative death cult bit, which I felt brought the movie down to predictable-netflix-type-bollox standards.

Christine (2016)
Kate Plays Christine (2016)

Already submitted upthread

Operation Dunkirk (2017)
Dunkirk (2017)

probably for another thread where Asylum rush out hilarious z-movies that turn out to better than the ones they rip off.

Oh yeah mockbusters deserves to be (or already is) a separate thread, think I might have said so before itt

The Mercy (2017)
Crowhurst (2017)

dark city/matrix

What’s that, the sixth time some combo of dark city matrix gattaca existenz has been mentioned itt

http://24.media.tumblr.com/4f52d14e7e6387fce38cd44163aed8f3/tumblr_mmsvus5N1U1sp0gj9o1_500.gif

Deep Star Six (1989)
Leviathan (1989)

― Josh in Chicago, Saturday, March 26, 2016 2:17 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

and The Abyss the same year! these are the kind that i really find fascinating... you can imagine at least one being a rush job based on rumor that the bigger studio is doing a deep-sea alien movie...but with three in play you have to figure out what was in the water (yuk yuk) that led to this. see my remarks upthread on how you can imagine two screenwriters both reading a mid-90s article on what would happen if an asteroid hit the earth, and cooking up substantively different takes on how that could be made into a movie. there's also just a perennial problem with hollywood buying into deep-sea sci-fi movies, which never seem to quite connect with the public the way they expect. sphere (1998), deep blue sea (1999) and virus (1999) also reflect this impulse i think.

Different media but leftovers and left behind (both 2014) definitely counts

Btw wow @ a quiet place/the silence, that one seems like a case of the aqp writers ripping off the source material for the silence wholesale

So thankful that the producers of God's Not Dead rushed out an adaptation of Little Women for us this year so we don't have to wait for that slowpoke Greta Gerwig to finish her own adaptation.

Shazaam (1995)
Kazaam (1996)

Sorry

(This is where I initiate my plan to further promote confusion by insisting to all and sundry that both films were total rip-offs of the 1994 Sherman Hemsley tv movie entitled Abracadabra.)

New World Pictures tried to make an Ant-Man movie in the late 80s because they knew Disney was making Honey I Shrunk the Kids. There's a story in "Marvel Comics: The Untold Story" about Stan Lee always pitching an Ant-Man movie and everyone else pointing out that Ant-Man can go through keyholes and that's it.

RBG (2018)
On the Basis of Sex (2018)

Everyone cites Ghoulies (1985) and Critters (1986) as examples of the spate of Gremlins (1984) ripoffs but it seems there is an argument for their inclusion in the magician movie canon

Although widely believed to have been made to cash in on the success of the similarly themed Gremlins (which is also owned by Warner Bros.),[1][2][3] director Stephen Herek has refuted this in interviews, pointing out that the first Critters script was written by Domonic Muir long before Gremlins went into production and subsequently underwent rewrites to reduce the apparent similarities between the two films

and

Ghoulies is often considered a cash-in on the success of Gremlins, as was Critters. Was that movie an influence in any way and how did you feel about these comparisons?

The truth is, we were in production at the same time. We were curious about them, and they were curious about us. They were so curious about us, in fact, that Warner Bros. briefly sued to stop us from using the name – they lost. Part of the reason that Gremlins came out first, is that Charlie Band ran out of money halfway through shooting, so a few months went by as we all scrambled for the money, allowing Gremlins to open first. Strategically, I think Charlie positioned the release that way, as well.

At some point we are going to have to reckon with what exactly went on wrt

The Sopranos (1999, pilot shot in 1997)
Analyze This (1999)
National Lampoon’s The Don’s Analyst (1997)

I still don’t understand how/why Octopussy and Never Say Never Again came out the same year

I saw both at the cinema as a wee nipper, didn't realise it was same year. Heady times.

weird james bonds rights issues - this guy who cowrote Thunderball essentially had the right to remake Thunderball, using any elements that already appeared in Thunderball, as many times as he wanted. clearly he found some money/producers who realized this, along with connery's enduring popularity, could be leveraged into a hit. and probably that, versus putting it out in a bond off-year, it would do better if marketed as a clear choice: connery vs moore, c'mon, who do you really wanna see folks?