A friend and I were discussing the phenomenon of movies or TV shows that deal with the same story or theme, and get released around the same time, without coordination between the two productions (and without one obviously copycatting the other). Some examples include Armageddon and Deep Impact, both about an asteroid threatening the earth, coming out in mid-1998; and Tom Fontana’s Borgia and Showtime’s The Borgias both premiering in 2011.
Ca. 2000, two biopic movies were released almost simultaneously about the early 1970s middle-distance runner Steve Prefontaine, who died in a car accident as he was headed into his prime. How and why this happened is still a mystery.
In 2006, 30 Rock, a show about the making of a weekly TV comedy show, and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, a show about the making of a weekly TV comedy show, both premiered. Studio 60 was produced by Aaron Sorkin and written as a drama, and as I recall, the smart money was on it to be the one that survived. Which is not, of course, how it worked out.
There was a good stretch there where most of Dreamwork’s CGI movies were parallels to Pixar’s. They didn’t quite seem to grasp just what was making the Pixar movies good, though.
You’re at Warner’s and have had a smutty Mark Twain biopic in development for years. You hear Lion’s Gate is rushing something very similar into production. It’s now or never. What are you going to do?
In the last few decades, we’ve seen dueling versions of Aladdin, Dangerous Liaisons, Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, Linda Lovelace, John Holmes, Superman and Truman Capote. Most of these were the result of the situation I just described.
The Poseidon Adventure (1972) was remade twice, less than a year apart, once for TV with the same name as the original (Nov 2005), once as a theatrical movie called simply Poseidon (May 2006).
Murray Yeston wrote a musical called Phantom and was planning to bring it to Broadway. However, Andrew Lloyd Webber got there first, and another Phantom musical won’t hit Broadway for 100 years.
The 2005 television season included the debut of *Surface *(unknown life forms are discovered living in the ocean), *Threshold *(aliens transforming humans by rewriting their DNA) and *Invasion *(unknown life forms living in the ocean are transforming themselves into humans by rewriting their DNA), not to mention the similar-themed *Medium *and Ghost Whisperer.
They’re not on at exactly the same time, but can anyone tell the difference between Mr. Selfridge recently on PBS Masterpiece Classic and The Paradise on PBS Masterpiece Classic now? :dubious:
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