6 ms·

Even if this was the result of an illusionist, it highlights something I've often thought of, and has come up on HN a few times: that very similar products and

by chrisa 17y ago

Even if this was the result of an illusionist, it highlights something I've often thought of, and has come up on HN a few times: that very similar products and movies will come out at just about the same time. The best examples I can give are from movies, and how close together certain movies are made and released, that have very similar plots: Deep Impact (May 1998) -> Armageddon (July 1998) The Illusionist (September 2006) -> The Prestige (October 2006) Paul Blart: Mall Cop (January 2009) -> Observe and Report (April 2009) These movies came out too close together for one to copy the other, so either the directors and studios were in it together on these movies (entirely likely I suppose: I don't know much about the movie industry; if anyone does know why this occurs, I'd be very interested), or one studio got wind of what the other was doing and made a "copy" before the original even came out, or else something much more subtle is going on. In the startup / tech world, I think this happens too, because we all tend to follow the same blogs, news sources, etc – so any subtle (probably unintentional) message that makes one of us think of a new product makes 1000 of us think of a nearly identical product, at the exact same time. To me, that highlights execution is so important, and ideas are a "dime a dozen".

pavel_lishin 17y ago
Three examples over more than a decade can be easily chalked up to coincidence.
- chrisa 17y ago
  I just picked three; here's some more: (It still could be coincidence I suppose, but it feels like more than that) http://www.11points.com/Movies/11_Damn_Near_Identical_Movies_That_Were_Released_at_the_Same_Time http://www.11points.com/Movies/11_Damn_Near_Identical_Movies... http://www.filmjunk.com/2007/03/07/when-movies-come-in-pairs-examples-of-hollywood-deja-vu/ http://www.filmjunk.com/2007/03/07/when-movies-come-in-pairs...
- varikin 17y ago
  I saw this all the time when I worked at a movie theater 12 years ago. Vampires and Blade (1998) Mighty Joe Young and some other ape movie. Two horror movies with bats. Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line. It happens over and over again. A semi-biggish movie and another that gets forgotten.
joezydeco 17y ago
One thing you don't realize about the movie industry is that parts of it actually move a lot slower than you think. Some of these scripts (actually, most of them) float around Hollywood for years, even a decade or longer. They get pushed from studio to studio, shopped around, then suddenly a director or star takes interest in it and a project begins to form. One can definitely infer once the wheels start moving on a picture (OMG Brad Pitt signed on to do Freakonomics:The Movie!) and word spreads that copycats definitely pop up to try and take some of the action. You can also add [A Bug's Life (Nov 1998) -> Antz (Oct 1998)] to your list. There's some background here: http://www.businessweek.com/1998/47/b3605013.htm http://www.businessweek.com/1998/47/b3605013.htm
- thefool 17y ago
  This is a better explanation for the movie phenomena. Probably where something like this occurs more is when people who have had experience working together continue working on parallel projects with similar executions even after parting ways.
  - joezydeco 17y ago
    Well, for some scripts, nearly everyone in the business has read it by the time it gets attached to a director and/or star.
muhfuhkuh 17y ago
"so either the directors and studios were in it together on these movies (entirely likely I suppose: I don't know much about the movie industry; if anyone does know why this occurs, I'd be very interested), or one studio got wind of what the other was doing and made a "copy" before the original even came out, or else something much more subtle is going on." Or, they sit on similarly produced movies for years until such moment as it is economically "sensible" for them to release it. The entertainment industry has done that with dead people (Bernie Mac, Heath Ledger, Michael Jackson, etc.) for a long time. If they see advanced hype from one movie (in the case of Armageddon), they'll release their not-as-good one (Deep Impact, IMO) as an early-bird special to get people in the theater thinking "hey, it's just as good, whatever". Now, there are companies (like the Asylum) that make films _directly_ knocking off upcoming movies. They shoot and produce them in months and push it straight-to-disc for the rental/retail market. That's a different thing altogether.
- gnaritas 17y ago
  Deep Impact was better than Armageddon. Oil roughnecks in space with nuclear bombs, are you kidding me!
mixmax 17y ago
I spoke to my patent attorney about this some years ago, and he confirmed that this is indeed the case. Very often similar or identical patents are being filed within a very short timeperiod. Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Grey's filing of the telephone patent is a good example. They didn't have a name or a cause for it other than pocket philosophy, but it's a generally accepted truth that can be easily observed in their everyday work.
petercooper 17y ago
or else something much more subtle is going on. It's driven me bonkers for the last year but there's a technical term for this (when a combination of external stimuli lead different people to come to similar conclusions and have similar ideas at the same time). I read an interesting Wikipedia article on it a few years back.. yet a good 10 minutes of Googling has failed to bring it back to me. Update — I tried again and about 20 searches in found what it might have been: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery .. specifically: A recombinant-DNA-inspired "paradigm of paradigms" has been posited, that describes a mechanism of "recombinant conceptualization." This paradigm predicates that a new concept arises through the crossing of pre-existing concepts and facts
- jerf 17y ago
  "Synchronicity"?
  - petercooper 17y ago
    That might be the specific one I was thinking of actually.. thanks! :-) A pretty good article nonetheless: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity
philwelch 17y ago
Dark City (February 98) -> The Matrix (March 99) -> Existenz (April 99).
InclinedPlane 17y ago
There is no mystery here. Movies take a significant amount of time to produce, and they spend a fair amount of time in various pre-production phases as well. As it turns out, the entertainment industry is a fairly small world, just about everybody knows what just about everybody else is doing. If nothing else, movie productions must maintain some degree of publicity in order to attract talent for the cast and crew to work on the movie itself. And in recent years anyone with a subscription to IMDB pro has access to all that information. The fact that often there are movies with highly similar themes that are released in close succession is most likely attributable to nothing more than folks copying what seem to be "hot" ideas of others.

by chrisa 17y ago

pavel_lishin 17y ago

Three examples over more than a decade can be easily chalked up to coincidence.

chrisa 17y ago
I just picked three; here's some more: (It still could be coincidence I suppose, but it feels like more than that) http://www.11points.com/Movies/11_Damn_Near_Identical_Movies_That_Were_Released_at_the_Same_Time http://www.11points.com/Movies/11_Damn_Near_Identical_Movies... http://www.filmjunk.com/2007/03/07/when-movies-come-in-pairs-examples-of-hollywood-deja-vu/ http://www.filmjunk.com/2007/03/07/when-movies-come-in-pairs...
varikin 17y ago
I saw this all the time when I worked at a movie theater 12 years ago. Vampires and Blade (1998) Mighty Joe Young and some other ape movie. Two horror movies with bats. Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line. It happens over and over again. A semi-biggish movie and another that gets forgotten.

joezydeco 17y ago

One thing you don't realize about the movie industry is that parts of it actually move a lot slower than you think. Some of these scripts (actually, most of them) float around Hollywood for years, even a decade or longer. They get pushed from studio to studio, shopped around, then suddenly a director or star takes interest in it and a project begins to form. One can definitely infer once the wheels start moving on a picture (OMG Brad Pitt signed on to do Freakonomics:The Movie!) and word spreads that copycats definitely pop up to try and take some of the action. You can also add [A Bug's Life (Nov 1998) -> Antz (Oct 1998)] to your list. There's some background here: http://www.businessweek.com/1998/47/b3605013.htm http://www.businessweek.com/1998/47/b3605013.htm

thefool 17y ago
This is a better explanation for the movie phenomena. Probably where something like this occurs more is when people who have had experience working together continue working on parallel projects with similar executions even after parting ways.
- joezydeco 17y ago
  Well, for some scripts, nearly everyone in the business has read it by the time it gets attached to a director and/or star.

muhfuhkuh 17y ago

"so either the directors and studios were in it together on these movies (entirely likely I suppose: I don't know much about the movie industry; if anyone does know why this occurs, I'd be very interested), or one studio got wind of what the other was doing and made a "copy" before the original even came out, or else something much more subtle is going on." Or, they sit on similarly produced movies for years until such moment as it is economically "sensible" for them to release it. The entertainment industry has done that with dead people (Bernie Mac, Heath Ledger, Michael Jackson, etc.) for a long time. If they see advanced hype from one movie (in the case of Armageddon), they'll release their not-as-good one (Deep Impact, IMO) as an early-bird special to get people in the theater thinking "hey, it's just as good, whatever". Now, there are companies (like the Asylum) that make films _directly_ knocking off upcoming movies. They shoot and produce them in months and push it straight-to-disc for the rental/retail market. That's a different thing altogether.

gnaritas 17y ago
Deep Impact was better than Armageddon. Oil roughnecks in space with nuclear bombs, are you kidding me!

mixmax 17y ago

I spoke to my patent attorney about this some years ago, and he confirmed that this is indeed the case. Very often similar or identical patents are being filed within a very short timeperiod. Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Grey's filing of the telephone patent is a good example. They didn't have a name or a cause for it other than pocket philosophy, but it's a generally accepted truth that can be easily observed in their everyday work.

petercooper 17y ago

or else something much more subtle is going on. It's driven me bonkers for the last year but there's a technical term for this (when a combination of external stimuli lead different people to come to similar conclusions and have similar ideas at the same time). I read an interesting Wikipedia article on it a few years back.. yet a good 10 minutes of Googling has failed to bring it back to me. Update — I tried again and about 20 searches in found what it might have been: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery .. specifically: A recombinant-DNA-inspired "paradigm of paradigms" has been posited, that describes a mechanism of "recombinant conceptualization." This paradigm predicates that a new concept arises through the crossing of pre-existing concepts and facts

jerf 17y ago
"Synchronicity"?
- petercooper 17y ago
  That might be the specific one I was thinking of actually.. thanks! :-) A pretty good article nonetheless: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity

philwelch 17y ago

Dark City (February 98) -> The Matrix (March 99) -> Existenz (April 99).

InclinedPlane 17y ago

There is no mystery here. Movies take a significant amount of time to produce, and they spend a fair amount of time in various pre-production phases as well. As it turns out, the entertainment industry is a fairly small world, just about everybody knows what just about everybody else is doing. If nothing else, movie productions must maintain some degree of publicity in order to attract talent for the cast and crew to work on the movie itself. And in recent years anyone with a subscription to IMDB pro has access to all that information. The fact that often there are movies with highly similar themes that are released in close succession is most likely attributable to nothing more than folks copying what seem to be "hot" ideas of others.