In regular ol’ Hollywood there are suspicious runs of similar themed movies, like Deep Impact and Armageddon as just one example where to guess spies report back on what other studios are working on.
But man the CGI animation field takes this to amazing lengths, for a good while it was basically standard for Pixar and Dreamworks to release each a similar themed movie at most a year apart. Oh look two ant movies, oh look two fish movies, oh look two NYC zoo animals go to live in the wild movies etc. Other studios also got in the act. The one time I have seen the critics respond harshly was The Wild, excoriating it for essentially copying the premise of Madagascar.
Do they really have insiders and spies, do they base decisions on what to greenlight based on what the other studios are doing?
There’s a certain amount of incestuous interchange at Production Management level that happens, and some ideas may come with them. In the case of Dreamworks and Pixar it was Jeffrey Katzenberg. But sometimes it’s just coincidence.
Pixar was developing a film about two newts who escape from a testing facility (called Newt), but as Blue Sky was making Rio, about parrots that escape a testing facility, Pixar scrapped their film.
Disney also scrapped Chris Sanders’s film American Dog and turned it into Bolt, I think because the plot was too similar to the first Cars (or maybe that was a different film).
This happens in live action movies also. It would be rare for a studio to intentionally produce a film similar to one in production by another studio. But it would also be rare to stop production when finding out another studio is doing a similar film. And as far as spies go, there aren’t many closely kept secrets in Hollywood. Productions involve a lot of people who move frequently between the studios. In addition, scripts and concepts are always being pitched to multiple studios, and many times an idea someone claims is original was inspired by someone else’s idea. Then there’s just plain coincidence on top of all that.
This sounds (to me) like a terrible idea to do intentionally. Why start off by splitting your market between two similar films rather than creating an original enough product that you don’t risk being “the other [whatever] movie”.
Obviously it happens that two very similar films come out at the same time but I assumed this was more coincidental that they got started around the same time and, at most, they were competing to be sure yours wasn’t the one that came out a month late (“Didn’t we just see a talking cat movie? Let’s see something else…”)