Has anyone else noticed that Hollywood has a strange way of making two films about the same subject, often released at the same or similar time? I’m not talking about remakes (or reimaginings) of foreign films (for example, GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO or LET ME IN), nor about sequels or threequels – not even obvious copies (aka jumping on the band wagon) like SCREAM and I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER.

I’m talking about examples like DEEP IMPACT (May 1998) and ARMAGEDDON (August 1998) – two films about meteors heading towards Earth. Or  THE ILLUSIONIST (March 2007) and (far superior) THE PRESTIGE (November 2006) – period films about magicians, with strangley similar marketing. There is also MIRROR MIRROR (March 2012) and SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN (June 2012) – both re-tellings of the classic Snow White story, albeit one a comedy and the other a drama; and CAPOTE (February 2006) and INFAMOUS (September 2006), both virtually the same story of Truman Capote’s writing of In Cold Blood.

There are plenty more examples, if you sit and think about it for a while. These films are rarely made by the same studios either.

Director Wes Craven offers an explanation, one which I can only assume must be true. When he was trying to sell the script for NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET in the early 80s, he says that it bounced around all the studios in Hollywood for nearly three years before being sold to New Line Cinema (their first mainstream release, often then called ‘the house that Freddy built’). Craven claims that suddenly, before he sold the script, he heard about the production of a very similar film called DREAMSCAPE – and indeed, the concept does sound very similar. Both films were released in 1984 – DREAMSCAPE to disappear and NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET to enter the horror genre’s greatest films lists forever more. Craven suggests that studios liked his idea, and therefore hired screenwriters to produce a similar story – close, but not close enough for a lawsuit, to his idea – obviously for much less money and without a screenwriter intent on directing, as Craven was. Reading scripts, it seems, is a cheap way to gather ideas to commission more scripts.

The way it seems to work is that studios will very rarely acknowledge these releases, except in one case – bizarrely – in 1973, Warner Brothers were developing a film called The Tower, and 20th Century Fox were developing a similar film called The Glass Inferno. The studios decided to share the load, so to speak, combined the ideas and released the hugely successful THE TOWERING INFERNO. Unfortunately, this did not set a precedent and today we are given with the same idea twice.

Am I right about this, or am I pulling things out of thin air? I’ll say this though: now that you know about this trend, you will notice more and more of these occurrences. I invite other examples, post in the comments below…