| By Fred Topel
In Theaters Now
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This month alone has two releases that are strikingly similar to previous ones. The magician thriller The Prestige follows just months after The Illusionist, and Infamous waited a whole year to replay the exact same history as Capote. By now this is nothing new. Check out the long history of Hollywood’s twin movies, always by competing studios.
10. The Matrix/The 13th Floor - This is more of a trivia item since nobody remembers the latter film. But a month after the award-winning action epic, a second film about a virtual world where the residents didn’t know they were living in a computer hit theaters. It didn’t have martial arts though.
9. Rob Roy/Braveheart - Okay, these were about different Scottish historical figures, but come on. In April and May of the same year, two Scottish period pieces come out? Of course, William Wallace would kick Rob Roy’s ass as badly as he did at the box office.
8. Tombstone/Wyatt Earp - Here, audiences had the choice between a Kurt Russell vehicle where the original director was fired, or a Kevin Costner vehicle from his Bodyguard director. The latter seemed the better proposition until it clocked in at three hours.
7. Antz/A Bug’s Life - This was the beginning of the Disney/Dreamworks battle. Dreamworks has spent the past decade putting out their versions of the same movies as Disney’s, and in most cases, Pixar’s classics. Here, they actually did the bug world better, but come on, somebody should have stopped this nonsense before it got this far.
6. The Truman Show/EdTV - Within a year, two movies about men whose lives are televised hit theaters. One was a social allegory full of meaningful issues. The other had Matthew McConaughey doing the chicken dance.
5. Deep Impact/Armageddon – This may have been just a coincidence, but asteroids started to get into the public conscience around the late ‘90s, and it was a Disney/Dreamworks thing again. I favored the more intellectual and dramatic Deep Impact to the loud and confusing Aerosmith video.
4. Finding Nemo/Shark Tale - Here’s where the Disney/Dreamworks thing became painfully obvious. So Pixar has their greatest success with a fish movie, and it takes a whole year and a half for Dreamworks to finish theirs. Guys, at that point, isn’t it time to call it quits?
3. Mission to Mars/Red Planet/Ghosts of Mars - The real battle was Mission and Planet in the same year, both of which kind of bombed. At least Mission had a meaningful message instead of a robot with its good/evil switch flipped. Then the B-movie Ghosts came and it might as well have been Ghosts of Roger Corman.
2. Dante’s Peak/Volcano – This was the quintessential story of two studios rushing into production to capitalize on a trend. Twister did well, so what’s next? A volcano. The latter film actually one-upped the small town predecessor by setting the lava flow right in Hollywood.
1. Madagascar/The Wild - We’ll never know for sure, but it seems that Dreamworks actually rushed their zoo animals going to Africa movie to get it out first. They did so well by it that Disney’s was forced to open with no press as the obligatory pre-DVD announcement. Seriously, when Disney found out about Madagascar couldn’t they have at least had their zoo animals go to a different continent? |
