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Coincidental similarities


Brian Fowler

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Just now, Craig H said:

Oh, also, the Matrix and eXistenZ. The latter sounds like something Frank Thomas would be hawking in commercials.

Presumably too much time between them to say The Matrix and Dark City? 

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7 minutes ago, odessasteps said:

Presumably too much time between them to say The Matrix and Dark City? 

Hmm, nah, I'd allow it. I remember people making the similarities back in high school. We all loved the Matrix more, but Dark City was still pretty cool.

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I get the feeling a lot of these aren't coincidences, but rather cases of Hollywood being generally uncreative having a very "follower" culture.  A producer hears a certain subject matter might be picking up steam and might be getting hot at another studio and rushes to make his own.  I think that's what happened with the volcano movies and the 80s' spate of underwater things.

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Just now, Technico Support said:

I get the feeling a lot of these aren't coincidences, but rather cases of Hollywood being generally uncreative having a very "follower" culture.  A producer hears a certain subject matter might be picking up steam and might be getting hot at another studio and rushes to make his own.  I think that's what happened with the volcano movies and the 80s' spate of underwater things.

This is kind of the point I was trying to make earlier.  Everyone is talking about when these movies begin filming, but that's far too late in the process to say that these people aren't stealing these ideas.  Scripts and screenplays float around for years, and get sent to pretty much everybody in the industry.  Dredd and The Raid being made at almost the same time doesn't mean that one didn't rip off the other, or that both didn't rip off something that never actually got made.  If some screenplay was floating around that had a fight scene where someone fought through an entire building, and both Gareth Evans and Pete Travis (both from the UK) read it and decided to make an entire movie based loosely around that idea, I wouldn't be surprised.  I also wouldn't be surprised if Pete Travis heard about Gareth Evans idea and said, I could do that.  

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Not much coincidence, but this reminds me of Menno’s Mind, a Philip K. Dick knockoff from 1997 starring Billy Campbell, Corbin Bernsen, and Bruce Campbell. There’s a lot of Total Recall in there, but it also looks like someone thought Johnny Mnemonic was going to be a huge hit while it was in production and wanted to bite off it. 

It became an international hit on the bootleg dvd market several years later as The Matrix 2.

9-D8-C05-AA-385-C-40-FD-881-A-0-F5-E8-DF

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The Thomas Crown Affair remake (1999), and Entrapment (with Sean Connery & Catherine Zeta Jones) were, at one point, one project. There was a difference of opinion as to whether to make it contemporary or period, and eventually someone left but kept the script. Adapted it into a whole new movie.

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7 hours ago, supremebve said:

Scripts and screenplays float around for years, and get sent to pretty much everybody in the industry.  Dredd and The Raid being made at almost the same time doesn't mean that one didn't rip off the other, or that both didn't rip off something that never actually got made.

The craziest example of that is a piece of scene comparison in Jodorowsky's Dune, where they put bits from Jodo's storyboarded, fully artworked screenplay against bits from a number of films to show direct ripoffs of it. It really is jaw-dropping. 

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How about "The Prestige" and "The Illusionist."  I remember I bought the DVD for The Prestige and spent the entire time wondering when Edward Norton was showing up.  I didn't realize that there were two different magician movies until it was over, and Imdb-ed Edward Norton.  I would have bet all the money in my pocket that The Illusionist and The Prestige were one movie.

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Don't forget about the competing Lambada flicks in 1990 after the Golan-Globus split. Globus made "Lambada" while Golan made "The Forbidden Dance" and both were released on the same day. Also before the split Golan-Globus rushed out "Breakin'" since Orion Pictures had "Beat Street" in the works. 

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44 minutes ago, supremebve said:

How about "The Prestige" and "The Illusionist."  I remember I bought the DVD for The Prestige and spent the entire time wondering when Edward Norton was showing up.  I didn't realize that there were two different magician movies until it was over, and Imdb-ed Edward Norton.  I would have bet all the money in my pocket that The Illusionist and The Prestige were one movie.

Supremebve and Mark hate my first post.  Craig at least admits to being only half awake at the time when he read it.

Edited by J.T.
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24 minutes ago, happjack said:

Don't forget about the competing Lambada flicks in 1990 after the Golan-Globus split. Globus made "Lambada" while Golan made "The Forbidden Dance" and both were released on the same day. Also before the split Golan-Globus rushed out "Breakin'" since Orion Pictures had "Beat Street" in the works. 

Yeah, there were a shit ton of dancing movies following Breakin' and Dirty Dancing but I am not sure if that is coincidental similarity or plain ol' bandwagon jumping.

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18 minutes ago, J.T. said:

Yeah, there were a shit ton of dancing movies following Breakin' and Dirty Dancing but I am not sure if that is coincidental similarity or plain ol' bandwagon jumping.

You can't possibly believe that I can remember something that happened as long ago as yesterday.  

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14 hours ago, AxB said:

The Thomas Crown Affair remake (1999), and Entrapment (with Sean Connery & Catherine Zeta Jones) were, at one point, one project. There was a difference of opinion as to whether to make it contemporary or period, and eventually someone left but kept the script. Adapted it into a whole new movie.

I love stories like this where one project became something else.  Reminds me of Ocean's 12, which was a generic heist script that had been floating around for years before someone picked it up and retrofit it.  Problem with that film is you could tell it was not purpose-built from the ground up as an Ocean film; it had none of the feeling/vibe of the first.

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Like how Die Hard was originally offered to Frank Sinatra, and at one point John Matrix (Arnie in Commando) and John McClane were the same character?

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I just watched Dredd for the first time a couple weeks ago, and had no idea it was filmed at roughly the same time as the Raid.  Just figured someone saw Raid and figured they could make some money knocking off the plot.

Personally, I thought Dredd was bad so I might be more inclined to give the movie a pass if the studio wasn't trying to do something original and just went for "The Raid without the intellectual property lawsuit,"

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47 minutes ago, AxB said:

Like how Die Hard was originally offered to Frank Sinatra, and at one point John Matrix (Arnie in Commando) and John McClane were the same character?

I’ve always wanted to read those Roderick Thorp source material books out of curiosity. 

1 hour ago, Technico Support said:

I love stories like this where one project became something else.  Reminds me of Ocean's 12, which was a generic heist script that had been floating around for years before someone picked it up and retrofit it.  Problem with that film is you could tell it was not purpose-built from the ground up as an Ocean film; it had none of the feeling/vibe of the first.

This describes most of the Die Hards. With a Vengeance in particular was originally a Lethal Weapon spec script, which is why it’s still a two-hander with Zeus filling in for Murtaugh. At least four of the Hellraiser movies were just supernatural horror scripts that Pinhead is inserted into, mostly peripherally.

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1 hour ago, AxB said:

Like how Die Hard was originally offered to Frank Sinatra, and at one point John Matrix (Arnie in Commando) and John McClane were the same character?

Contractually they had to offer the role to Sinatra, the whole deal was talked about in that Netflix doc about Die Hard.

Wasn't Die Hard 2 or at least the novel it was based on tossed around as a Commando sequel?

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2 hours ago, J.T. said:

Yeah, there were a shit ton of dancing movies following Breakin' and Dirty Dancing but I am not sure if that is coincidental similarity or plain ol' bandwagon jumping.

The Lambada movies wasn't either of those it was Golan and Globus trying to out do each other. 

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19 minutes ago, happjack said:

Contractually they had to offer the role to Sinatra, the whole deal was talked about in that Netflix doc about Die Hard.

Wasn't Die Hard 2 or at least the novel it was based on tossed around as a Commando sequel?

Here's a snippet of the interview with direct Steven De Souza about the proposed sequel to Commando and its spiritual connection to Die Hard 2.

Quote

I did write a sequel for that which is floating around on the Internet. Frank Darabont even did some revisions on it. In that movie, I would look at how experiences change people, such as how in Die Hard 2 people reference how famous John McClane is after the events of the first film.

“So for Commando 2, we figured that Arnold, after blowing up half of Los Angeles, achieves some notoriety, retires from the army and, by the time the sequel occurs, is running a security firm. The plot would have seen him hired by a big corporation to oversee their security to protect their executives from being kidnapped, to stop people breaking into their building and to make sure their computers are secure.”

But… there’s a twist!

“So he sets it up and hires the most dangerous people to be guards in the building and then lo and behold – he discovers the people he’s working for are in the illegal arms business and the big corporation is simply a front.

“The end of the movie would see Jenny [Alyssa Milano – Arnie’s daughter from the first film] and Cindy [Dawn Rae Chong’s stewardess], who is now a lawyer, trapped in the building and Arnold now has to defeat all the people he hired – all the meanest, toughest guards – as well as the security systems, the guard dogs, everything!

 

 

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