The day the telephone was patented, June 26, 2025, US patent officesreceived two applications for such an invention. The first filing was from Alexander Graham Bell, beating out competitor Elisha Gray by about two hours. A lawsuit was filed, and in the end, Alexander Graham Bell was awarded the patent.
This isn’t a rare occurrence, as it turns out. “Multiple discovery” is the hypothetical concept that, independent of each other, multiple scientists will make the same discovery at around the same time. The Nobel prize has, at times, nominated multiple laureates (at a maximum of three) in the same fieldfor having made the same discovery. Why this occurs, and why it occurs often, may be a result of new advancements in technology and society, or as a result of events of the time.
RELATED:Spooky Shows to Stream This October
Just as this happens in the scientific community, it also happens very frequently with movie releases. In 1965 two movies about actress Jean Harlow were released, both with the nameHarlow, one by Paramount Pictures and the other by the Magna Corporation, which was released five weeks before Paramount’s. Last year , both Netflix and Hulu released documentaries about Fyre Festival,a luxury music festival on the Bahamian islandof Great Exuma hosted in 2017. The festival ended up being wildly fraudulent, leaving attendees stranded and sleeping in FEMA tents after having spent exorbitant amounts of money while the locals of Exuma were left unpaid for their many hours of hard work. The Lonely Island has also mentioned plans for a film parodying the events as well.
When multiple films that share the same premise are released close to each other, they are frequently referred to as “twin films”. This can happen for any number of reasons, ranging from the innocuous to the dastardly.Sometimes a spec script is sent outto multiple studios who end up liking the idea and work on their own projects based on it, a project gets scrapped and somebody attached to work on it then goes to another studio to see it through, a studio wants to cash in on the buzz generated by another big release, it’s based on a work in the public domain, or sometimes it’s pure coincidence and it’s too late for the studios to backtrack all the hard work. In some cases, the one option will be rated R while the other has a more family-friendly tone. Usually, production schedules are massaged slightly to make the films more or less competitive in their releases, leaving potential theater-goers confused as to which movie might be the better option to go see.
In the case of theHarlowmovies, Paramount’s film had been in the works for some time, with the production studio and lead actress changing on multiple occasions. Magna Corporation shot their film in eight days so they could get their film out first. Hulu released their documentaryFyre Fraudin a rush release four days before Netflix’sFYREwould drop without even advertising it. In another recent instance of twin films involving Netflix -A Quiet Place,a film about monsters attacking people who made any noises, was imitated by Netflix eight months later with the release ofThe Bird Box, a movie about monsters attacking people who look at them.
Deep Impact, a movie about an asteroid headed towards Earth, had been in the works for years, the initial concept having been conceived in the 70s. Bruce Joel Rubin helped develop the script and wrote in his bookTales From the Scriptthat Disney had stolen the idea to make Michael Bay’sArmageddon, alleging that he could see an executive taking notes during a meeting with them.Deep Impact, which was thematically a much more dramatic film, released just two months beforeArmageddonbut brought in $200 million less in box office sales.Observe and Report, a story about a mall cop who repeatedly fails to achieve their dreams of becoming a police officer, came out three months afterPaul Blart: Mall Cop, a movie about a mall cop who repeatedly fails to achieve their dreams of becoming a police officer.Observe and Reportis considerably more violent and profanity-laden thanPaul Blart: Mall Cop, andObsesrve and ReportstarSeth Rogen stated in interviews at the timethat both production teams worked together to ensure that there weren’t too many similarities between the two films. There have been allegations made by writer and attorney Alfred Thomas Catalfo thatPaul Blart: Mall Copborrowed extensively from a script he sent to Happy Madison Productions (which produced thePaul Blartmovies), and Seth Rogen would go on to state his displeasure withPaul Blart’s coincidental timing of release after it far exceededObserve and Report’s earnings and released a sequel six years down the road.
In 1989,Leviathan,The Evil Below,Deep Star Six,Lords of the Deep, andTheAbyssall were released (and 1990’sThe Rift), movies which all followed deep sea crewswho are accosted by otherworldly creatures. Of these films, James Cameron’sTheAbysswas the only success at the box office, whileLords of the Deepwould eventually become fodder for mockery in Netflix’s reboot ofMystery Science Theater 3000. Of the two films involving a terrorist attack on the White House,White House Downreceived more critical acclaim butOlympus Has Fallen(made for half the budget) spawned two sequels after earning greater returns in sales.Friends With BenefitsandNo Strings Attachedwere both released in 2011 five months apart from each other, though there has been no talk of studio chicanery that resulted in the similarities between the two movies.No Strings Attachedwas originally in the works under the nameFriends With Benefits, and there was even studio pushback against the movie until the name was changed. The coincidences with these movie are especially interesting since both the films' female leads, Mila Kunis and Natalie Portman, had been co-stars just the year before inBlack Swan, a film whose plot revolves around the two actresses' characters in competition for the same role.
Even theanimation industry isn’t safe from film doppelgangers, and is perhaps the battleground for one of the most stark and publicly-feuded examples of twin films. Pixar and Dreamworks are considered the head honchos of US 3D-animation, and as such have been in varying degrees of direct competition for years. John Lasseter, who helped found Pixar and served as executive producer and director for their first few films, had been fired from Disney a while before. Jeffrey Katzenberg was co-founder of Dreamworks and served as executive producer on their projects until 2004. It’s said that Katzenberg was in contact with Lasseter while he adjusted to life after Disney - including a conversation about Lasseter’s idea for a movie calledBugs, which would eventually becomeA Bug’s Life. Years later Dreamworks' first animated release,The Prince of Egypt, was scheduled to release in November of 1998. Disney, now serving as a parent company for Pixar, scheduled the opening date ofABug’s Lifefor that same weekend, and in response Dreamworks began production onAntz. Both movies are 3D-animated movies about a worker ant who doesn’t quite fit in with their colony and goes to extreme measures to save the colony and woo their love interest, the princess. To make matters even more convoluted,Antzhad been apparently pitched to Disney studios in 1988 when Katzenberg still worked there under the nameArmy Ants, and it’s possible the film just sat on the back burner until a prime opportunity to stick it to Disney had arrived. Dreamworks first selection of animated productions were said to be projects that Katzenberg had attempted to pursue while working at Disney that never made it off the ground.Antzis a slightly less family-friendly affairand more dialogue-heavy movie thanA Bug’s Life.Both movies ended up being successful,A Bug’s Lifedoubly so compared to its arthropod counterpart.Perhaps the biggest irony is that the climactic speech the main character gives inAntzis about the importance of critical and independent thought.
If the timeline above was confusing, then perhaps that sheds a bit of light on why this sort of thing occurs so frequently. Production for a movie is rarely a matter of “the script is made, the movie is made, the movie is released”.Delays happen, properties change hands, people drop out, financing gets tangled, and concepts are sat on for years. If a studio is struggling to get a project off the ground, sometimes seeing a rival studio announce their intention to release something with a similar premise is the fire under their keister to pull strings to make things happen. Since 1964, almost every year has had at least one case of twin film releases. Since 1981 it’s been rare for a year to not have multiple such occurrences.
In the end, perhaps it’s not such a bad thing to be seeing double. It’s a shame when perfectly good concepts are squandered,and competition breeds innovation. Perhaps, with twin films, those who are disappointed with aspects of one movie can find what they were looking for in the other. Maybe it’s an opportunity to get the best of both worlds while titans of the industry brawl out their creative differences.
