Movie Twins? Weirdly Similar Films That Came Out Within Months Of Each Other
The new movie Life, which opens Friday, is about astronauts who discover an alien life form and live to regret it. You could say exactly the same thing about Alien: Covenant, which was originally scheduled to open the following Friday — until someone realized that was a recipe for box-office disaster. Alien: Covenant will now open in early May, and that close call, crazy as it is, isn't uncommon in Hollywood.
Rival studios often stare each other down, refusing to blink, in showdowns that didn't need to happen. In 1998, Earth-snuffing asteroids were blown up in the nick of time by nuclear warheads not once, but twice: with much electronic beeping and and slightly higher beeping and enormous special effects in . That same year, animated insects skittered onto movie screens in both and — and all of that just one year after dueling lava flows erupted in and .
