Repeat Performances

 

Call it zeitgeist. Call it creative synchronicity. Call it outright plagiarism (and some have over the years, as you’ll see). But however you label it, you get two or more films in the same year with the same subject. Occasionally it happens because a film is an unexpected success and executives see a chance to jump aboard the bandwagon, betting large on audiences wanting to see more of the same. But sometimes, just sometimes, Big Ideas strike two filmmaking teams simultaneously. In the end, of course, there’s usually only one winner at the box office.

 

Back to the 80s: Sequel Mania!

 

There have been several big plot ideas arriving at the same time over the years, but few were bigger than the matchup between Deep Impact and Armageddon. In one corner, you had the Spielberg-produced tale of a lad (Elijah Wood) and his family affected when a gigantic flying rock threatens to smash into the Earth, and in the other, a typically overblown Michael Bay effort which sees Bruce Willis leading a team of oil drillers into space to, er, stop a giant rock from smashing into the Earth. Though the subject was nearly identical, the approaches couldn’t have been different. Deep Impact, directed by former ER helmer Mimi Leder, focused on intimate emotions set against the scale of global destruction and Morgan Freeman’s reassuring tones as the president. Armageddon is loaded with blokes being blokey, a hefty rock soundtrack and editing that threatens to cause spontaneous epilepsy in viewers. Still, Armageddon won the battle for money, setting records and also achieving the cheesiest love scene in years as Ben Affleck and Liv Tyler bond over Animal Crackers.

 

The ten most romantic lines... ever

Movies men cry to

 

 

Another hot button subject – pardon the pun – resulted when Fox and Universal both shoved lava-spewing thrillers into production. Volcano (in which magma erupted from the streets of LA and threatened to melt Hollywood unless the classic team Tommy Lee Jones and Anne Heche could stop it) went up against Dante’s Peak, with Linda Hamilton and Pierce Brosnan who fought to stop a small town from being destroyed when the titular smokestack blew its top. Volcano had the bigger effects budget, scale and stars, but Dante’s Peak had the last laugh at the box office. We’d like to think the films emerged because writers were basing their ideas on big Hollywood execs like Harvey Weinstein, always ready to explode at the slightest prompting.

 

Is CGI over?

 

Finally, there’s the caustic case of Antz, which DreamWorks Animation touted as their first big cartoon project. Not-so-coincidentally, its was announced shortly after Pixar had made public the plans for their second film, A Bug’s Life. Conspiracy theories remain to this day, but one thing seems clear: DreamWorks Animation boss Jeffrey Katzenberg was out for blood after his ouster from Disney, and while he didn’t target Pixar directly, he had been told about A Bug’s Life… While both have their charms, A Bug’s Life definitely won at the worldwide box office. So it can be risky- but success can pay big. Who wants to try two films about Giant Panthers? Anyone? Anyone?