Empire Magazine ran a feature recently, about a company that specialise in quick, cheap knock-off movies with lawyer-baiting titles that are released direct to DVD to make a fast buck while the plundered film is still on general release. Don’t want to go see a movie in the theaters? Here’s a similar movie, on DVD! See if you can guees what movies are plundered here (it’s not difficult)
Transmorphers
Alien VS Hunter
I Am Omega
Actually, I looked it up; this is the company, “The Asylum”
and their full filmography, in all it’s you-gotta-be-shittin-me glory.
[QUOTE=Freudian Slit]
To Wong Foo and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.
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Actually these two movies are a year apart. Priscilla being made a year early, and it was a local Australian production. I have (and I understand much of the Australian film industry) always thought of To Wong, as an American adaption of Priscilla.
Titanic and George of the Jungle both came out in 1997 and are practically the same movie.
[QUOTE=muzzynyc]
Just finished reading To Infinity and Beyond, the history of Pixar (fantastic book, highly recommended) and it’s not said straight out but heavily implied that Antz came about because Dreamworks wanted to steal Pixar’s thunder and already knew that Bug’s Life was in the works. The book says that Dreamworks promised Pixar that Antz would not release until after Bug’s Life, but then released it before.
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It drives me nuts when I see the low-budget cash-ins on other animated films.
There’s a company called Peter Pan that has, in the past few years, banged out DVDs titled Ratatoing, The Little Cars in the Great Race, A Car’s Life, and The Little Bee Movie.
Valmont in November 1989 and Dangerous Liaisons, in December 1988. Though inspired by the same novel by Choderlos de Laclos, LLD seems to have been the more successfaul film – and just made it under the “within the same year” wire.
Hollywood actually does this on purpose. It has to do with the selection process. The hype for a movie gets up, so someone makes a low rent version in order to try and cash in and compete. Hollywood is generally full of idiots who can’t understand what’s good and what isn’t. They need to have it confirmed by focus groups or someone else who has an imagination.
[QUOTE=Mangetout]
Also - neither of them are really about penguins anyway - they’re about humans, who happen to look a bit like penguins. Penguins don’t really dance, sing, surf, wear clothes, make documentaries, build houses or many of the other things they’re depicted as doing in those movies - so it’s not really about penguins at all - at least not any penguins that inhabit this planet.
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Mangetout, if it looks like a penguin, walks like a penguin, and swims like a penguin … IT’S A PENGUIN! 
[QUOTE=Skammer]
What about 18 Again?
Let’s see…
Like Father Like Son[/url ] – 1987
[url=http://imdb.com/title/tt0094737/]Big – 1988
Vice Versa – 1988
18 Again – 1988
The two Freaky Friday movies were released in 1976 and 2003.
[/QUOTE]
Yes, I meant something like what you guys meant … age switching movies, similar time frame … not about penguins … 
How about James Cameron’s Titanic (1997)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120338/
and the TV movie Titanic starring George C. Scott?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115392/ (1996)
And the Broadway musical Titanic (1997)
Speed and Blown Away (1994)
Mission to Mars and Red Planet (2000)
I think it’s a little much for coincidence or confirmation bias. I think Omniscient and others nailed it. “Jenkins! Goldberg! Fox has a bomb movie! We need a bomb movie! Get me a screenplay, dammit!”
Lake Placid and Deep Blue Sea were released in theaters a mere 12 days apart. Open both those imdb links and glance at the movie posters on the left. Even small, it’s comically obvious there was something fishy going on.
[QUOTE=Ellis Dee]
Lake Placid and Deep Blue Sea were released in theaters a mere 12 days apart. Open both those imdb links and glance at the movie posters on the left. Even small, it’s comically obvious there was something fishy going on.
[/QUOTE]
Isn’t Deep Blue Sea the one where
the superintelligent shark jumped up out of the waterwell into the laboratory, executed a perfect 180 direction change, crunched down on Morgan Freeman, then somehow maneuvered herself back into the water well to escape? We saw that and just started HOWLING with laughter at the utter absurdity of it.
Similar to the Titanic case, we had the BBC/PBS series Elizabeth R (1971)
and the movie Mary Queen of Scots (1971)
and the Robert Bolt play Vivat! Vivat Regina! (1970, 1972)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivat!_Vivat_Regina!
The TV series and the movie BOTH starred Glenda Jackson as Elizabeth. If only she’d been in the play she could’ve taken the triple crown.
Heck, recently we’ve had The Other Boleyn Girl (2008)
and the TV series The Tudors
(Not to mention the UK TV version of **The Other Boleyn Girl[/B’{
)
Just can’t get enough of them Tudors.
[QUOTE=jayjay]
Isn’t Deep Blue Sea the one where
the superintelligent shark jumped up out of the waterwell into the laboratory, executed a perfect 180 direction change, crunched down on Morgan Freeman, then somehow maneuvered herself back into the water well to escape? We saw that and just started HOWLING with laughter at the utter absurdity of it.
[/QUOTE]
No, It was Samuel L. Jackson who got et.
[QUOTE=Marley23]
No, It was Samuel L. Jackson who got et.
[/QUOTE]
That’s right! I forgot who played the boss/human villain! It got lost in the wave of sincere hilarious disgust for the sheer physical impossibility of the scene…
hehheh, I laughed my ass off at Deep Blue Sea during the scene in question, despite enjoying the movie as a whole.
Another one just occured to me. Clearly Zodiac was the project of origination, spawning the crappy copycat The Zodiac to get rushed into theaters seven months earlier.
[QUOTE=CalMeacham]
Heck, recently we’ve had The Other Boleyn Girl (2008)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0467200/
(Not to mention the UK TV version of **The Other Boleyn Girl[/B’{
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0357392/
[/quote]
Would that be a Tudor twofer?
I remember thinking that The Road to El Dorado and The Emperor’s New Groove had kind of a similar thing going on. At least superficially.
Just a little off the main theme of the thread, I remember being amazed watching Speed (1994), Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995), and Money Train (1995) in fairly close succession. Though they were all action flicks, they didn’t really share too much plotwise, except that each featured a major subway train derailment stunt.
It seemed as if some SFX trick had just been perfected, and every action movie wanted to use it.
[edited to clarify my poor sentence structure]
1992 saw the release of the films
1492: Conquest of Paradise
and
Chistopher Columbus