How about Dr. Strangelove and Fail-Safe, both released in 1964.
I’m guessing (and it’s only a guess) that movies are made in response to something else happening in the world (in the news, in pop culture, in technology, whatever). There is no reason to be surprised that two or more studios would react in the same way to the same stimuli.
I think you are on to something. For example, in late 1997, there was a story that generated some buzz about a near earth object passing by in the 2030s and what we might do to stop it. Next year, two movies (Deep Impact, Armageddon)
In 1995, there was the faked movies about the Alien Autopsies in Area 51 that created some buzz about whether they were real or faked. Next year: Independence Day, and Mars Attacks.
In 1992, we had the 500 year anniversary of Columbus’ landing, so we had two movies about him.
The late 90s, with the advance of the Internet, brought about the idea of computers powerful enough to create virtual worlds and your world not being real (Matrix, Truman Show, Thirteenth Floor, etc.)
I think that your point is generally true.
I asked a guy in the script department that question - I forget which two films were coming out at the time, but both were similar.
He said there were many ways that could happen:
Sometimes, word got out that a studio was looking for some particular project for a name star - for instance, “Brad Pitt wants to do a film about a mobster in Vegas…” and literary agents would get wind of it. Soon, you had three, four or more scripts written by professional script writers about various mob guys with ties to Vegas. While the original studio would buy one for Brad, the other three or more scripts would then be shopped around and picked up, especially since word was that another studio was thinking of doing something similar, so they contact Ben Affleck and he is interested in that script.
A more cynical concept was that a script that was read by studios was bid upon, but they lost the bid. They simply went out, hired a script writer and told him/her what they wanted and had their own version created - again, maybe to appease some name star who had expressed interest, but now they needed to find a script.
Basically, he felt that there were no coincidences, and that if an idea is/was good, someone, somewhere, was going to steal the idea and run with it.
However, he did say that sometimes this worked in reverse - studio “A” had started pre-production on a film, only to discover studio “B” was doing a similar film with a bigger name actor - and thus studio “A” stopped production. Who knows - there might have been a hit film in the works called, “Silence Of The Sheep”, starring Paulie Shore that never got made…
I’ve often wondered what the state of Leonardo DiCaprio’s mind must have been whilst filming both Shutter Island and Inception. Both movies deal with deciphering what is real vs what is all in the mind, and came out within months of each other. I don’t know his filming schedule on those but I’m betting he had some interesting dreams during that time.
As superficially similar as these two seem, they couldn’t have been more different. If Paul Blart: Mall Cop was D.C. Cab, Observe and Report would be Taxi Driver. I didn’t feel right for three days after I saw Observe and Report.
Obviously, these were for the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s voyage.
A Hard Day’s Night (1964)
Having a Wild Weekend/Catch Us If You Can (1965)
Both films about British invasion bands. The latter was filmed as a copycat with the Dave Clark Five.
In television, you had the strange case of
Amazing Stories (1985)
The New Twilight Zone (1985)
**Alfred Hitchcock ** (1985)
All three were anthology series, when they hadn’t been a successful anthology series on TV in about 15 years. Steven Speilberg was given a two-year contract for Amazing Stories, and the other networks followed suit.
You’ve cited this one in a previous, similar thread. I’d like to respond the way I did before, by adding The World of Suzie Wong (1960) to that pair. And all three movies were big moneymakers at the time.
I had left this one out because Vietnam movies happen a lot. but my list had three:
Heartbreak Ridge (1986)
Platoon (1986)
Full Fetal Jacket (1987)
I also had another prominent one from 1986 or 1987 but can’t think of it now.
*Good Morning Vietnam *or Hamburger Hill
… Fetal?
For TV movies three networks put on films about Amy Fisher. Two aired the same day.
The Pirate Movie (1982)
The Pirates of Penzance (1983)
Both were based on the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, although the first was a very loose interpretation (and IMO much, much worse).
This is true in the literary world as well. In one of my old fantasy anthologies the editor mentioned in the foreword that she had received a lot of “sacrificial maiden”-themed stories that year; she presumed it was due to “Dragonslayer” having come out earlier that year and it’s opening scene being particularly inspiring to the authors.
Incidentally, there was a pretty interesting Radiolab short recently, What Does Technology Want?, about how certain ideas (in many fields) seem to crop up independently at the same time.