Here are some examples:
The Prestige & The Illusionist
Antz & A Bug's Life
Darkest Hour & Dunkirk
Olympus Has Fallen & White House Down
Friends With Benefits & No Strings Attached
Jobs (2013) and Steve Jobs (2015)
Armageddon and Deep Impact
Volcano and Dante's Peak
Batman vs Superman - Captain America: Civil War
Wyatt Earp vs Tombstone
Madagascar and The Wild
Mirror Mirror and Snow White
The Huntsman, After Earth, and Oblivion
Hercules with The Rock and the Legend of Hercules
Or 2010 (The Year of the Elite Squad) with:
The Expendables
Red
The A-Team
The Losers
"Studios have hundreds of scripts waiting in the wings to be made. So when one studio hears that A Bug's Life is coming out, they'll quickly greenlight Antz, a script that they've held onto for years, because they can leech off the marketing a bit. (It actually might be the other way around.)
However, it's not completely one-sided. Pixar isn't grumbling about it because they know that the idea of "bug movies" in the public mind is going to help them out as well. There's an economic term for this, kind of like how you see clusters of businesses offering similar goods all in one close location, like the Hammock District. The customers you lose to competition is offset by the fact that you'll get more customers overall because the general public knows where to go to buy hammocks."
*I want to add - do you think many people could solidly distinguish between Olympus Has Fallen or White House Down, or was there a crapshoot by moviegoers to see "that Whitehouse movie"?
There's a very good youtube video on this. They demonstrate it by having two competing vendors on a beach. They move the vendors around to figure out the most optimal locations. They end up being most optimal when they are next to each other. I'd assume this is a similar concept.
You are pretty much spot on.
What happens is that scripts get shopped around to different studios/producers/directors all over Hollywood. Because Hollywood is an industry that pretty much relies on networking and knowing the right people, these people of course eventually talk to each other, and word gets around that a studio picked up that script you thought had potential but decided to pass on. So now you are second guessing your decision to pass (because another studio clearly found a way to tweak the script and make it a potential money maker, otherwise they wouldn't have green lit it), and decide that your studio needs to take a shot on that movie. So you get someone to write a similar script or tweak a similar one that you had in your script vault, and you greenlight the movie for a scheduled release close to your competition's movie (because that's obviously when the market research people concluded was the best time to release the movie). Naturally, your movie is a few weeks/months behind, so you pretty much have to rush things in order to meet that release window.
So the result is that we get two very similar movies released in very close proximity to each other, with one being a good/decent movie (the original, well planned and produced movie), while the other is often utter dogshit (the rushed copycat). The prime example of this phenomenon is Dante's Peak and Volcano. Hollywood is a funny industry to work in sometimes.
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