One thing is all but guaranteed in Hollywood – if somebody comes up with a great idea that makes bad bank at the box office, a flood of imitators are going to follow suit with their own, probably inferior, ripoffs.
And though the history of cinema is littered with examples of movies made solely to cash-in on a prior hit film, it’s also fair to say that coincidences do, in fact, happen.
More to the point, some of those movies we’ve been fobbing off as knock-offs are actually innocent of all charges, as fishy as their mere existence might seem.
That’s certainly the case with these 10 films, which despite bearing similarities to more high-profile and successful movies released around the same time, actually didn’t crib from them at all.
The “twin movie” phenomenon is certainly a fascinating one, where similarly themed and premised films are released in close proximity to each other, but this often speaks more to the trend-chasing nature of the film industry, and how there really aren’t that many truly original ideas swirling around in Hollywood.
And so regardless of their quality, these not-ripoffs shouldn’t be remembered as cynical, deliberate facsimiles of other projects…
From the moment that The Silence was first announced, many dismissed it as a knock-off of A Quiet Place, given that it similarly revolves around Earth being invaded by monstrous creatures which hunt by sound.
That it was ultimately a critically panned Netflix Original only furthered the feeling that it was “A Quiet Place at home.”
But just because The Silence is a bad film, that doesn’t mean it’s guilty of cribbing from a big-screen hit.
Though the film was indeed released a year after A Quiet Place, it’s actually based on Tim Lebbon’s book which was released back in 2015.
And before you go accusing A Quiet Place of actually being the ripper-offers, screenwriters Bryan Woods and Scott Beck claimed they came up with the idea for their movie back in their college days in the early 2000s.
And so, as fundamentally naff as The Silence might be, considering that the public existence of its source material predates A Quiet Place by several years, it’s only guilty of being a bad film – not a lazy imitation.
This post was originally published on here
