There’s a movie, Employee of the Month, currently in release. What’s unusual is that there was a different movie with the same name released in 2004. Is this the quickest reuse of a movie title ever?
It doesn’t count the same, but Morgan Freeman is in a film called 10 Items or Less, the same title as a recently-premiered TBS sitcom.
I seem to remember that Henry Jaglom, the indy filmmaker, had a bit of a feud with Steven Spielberg for a while, because Spielberg made a movie called “Always” almost immediately after Jaglom did.
1985 (Jaglom’s) and 1989 (Spielberg’s).
Another example would be Crash (1996) and Crash (2004).
Noah Baumbach, who wrote and directed The Squid and the Whale last year, made a terrific, little-known movie in 1995 called Kicking and Screaming. Ten years later, in 2005, appeared the Will Ferrell movie Kicking & Screaming. Not exactly the same, as the latter movie uses an ampersand instead of spelling out “and” in its title.
The situation is funny mainly because the two films, while they’re both comedies, could not be more different in their approach.
There have been four movies called Wicked, three of them in the past decade, one of them this past year. None of them is based on Gregory Maguire’s popular novel or the Broadway musical based on it (which is in the process of spawning two movies).
But the winner has to be Harlow: two films by that name – both original biographies of Jean Harlow – were released about one month apart in 1965.
I just ran across another recycled title today: Derailed, which was a 2005 movie with Jennifer Aniston and Clive Owen, was also the title of a 2002 Jean-Claude van Damme movie.
There was a chilling DocuDrama called "Elephant"about terrorist murders in Northern Ireland which literally raises the hairs on the back of your neck and then infuriatingly somebody else as a “tribute to the original” used the title for a film about schoolchildren in a U.S. school going on a killing spree.