An analysis of Hollywood's history of releasing films with strikingly similar concepts in the same year, from successful romantic comedies like Friends with Benefits and No Strings Attached to rival disaster films Deep Impact and Armageddon, exploring the financial and cultural implications of such strategic overlaps.
Studios these days have the decency to avoid rival projects that clash with each other and cannibalize audiences in the same year. Backrooms and Obsession, if anything, are fueling more interest in each other by virtue of being small-budget horror movies toppling giants at the same time.
However, not too long ago, studios would simply release movies with the exact same premise within months of each other, armed with nothing more than hopes and dreams. Who can forget Friends with Benefits and No Strings Attached - two romantic comedies in which the protagonists fall in love after entering a casual relationship with each other - grossing exactly $149 million each in the same year?
Only four years later, No Strings Attached star Ashton Kutcher found himself in another similar situation after playing Steve Jobs in a movie titled Jobs, which clashed with Danny Boyle's infinitely more imaginative biopic. In the span of a month in 1998, Pixar released A Bug's Life and DreamWorks debuted Antz. But inarguably the most prominent example of a clash like this took place that same year, when two studios released big-budget apocalyptic movies with a meteor hurtling toward Earth.
The more popular of these two apocalyptic movies remains Michael Bay's Armageddon, starring Bruce Willis, Ben Affleck, Liv Tyler, and a host of others. The movie received poor reviews, but has emerged as something of a cornerstone of 1990s excess in mainstream Hollywood. It grossed around $550 million worldwide against a reported budget of $140 million.
However, only three months prior, Paramount released its own version of this premise: Deep Impact
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