10 Times Identical Films Were Released in the Same Year

Every now and then, moviegoers experience an eerie phenomenon. They buy a ticket to see the newest, biggest release of the moment, only to feel as if they’ve already seen it. Not only that, they saw it not that long ago. Maybe, in some cases, within the same year. They’re (probably) not going crazy—this is a phenomenon so well-documented it has its own name.

“Twin films” are movies that are spookily similar in plot and also share a release year, or were released within about twelve months of each other, and it happens more often than you think. There are many possible reasons for this. Hollywood is always making the same types of movies, so a lot of studios often have similar movies in development at the same time. Sometimes they’re about topical subjects — digital anxiety during the turn of the millennium, or terrorist attacks, or the threat of space debris crashing into Earth. Sometimes that’s just how two studios’ schedules happen to work out. Or maybe one studio or writer or director actually did just straight up plagiarize another.

Whatever the reason, not a year goes by without at least a couple of twin films raising questions about which idea came first, or debates about which film turned out to execute the premise better than the other. We’ve gathered ten pairs of the most suspiciously similar movies that famously share the same plot, the same premise, and sometimes nearly the same release date. Now that’s what we’d call a true double feature.

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