7 Movies With Shockingly Similar Counterparts

It’s not going to come as a shock to any of you when I say that Hollywood LOVES recycling movies, both partially and in their entirety. How many Spiderman reboots have we been subjected to in the last decade, just so that film makers can get just the right amount of grit into the series? Is it three now, or four? How many hilariously weak, Snakes On a Train style knock offs have we watched on Netflix (when there’s no one to chill with, of course) because they’re so laughably bad? All of them, that’s how many!

However, sometimes, it seems almost as though the same movie is made a number of times within the same year! Like the execs had two different routes they wanted to go with the same script and just decided ‘to hell with it, make both!’ That seems to be the case with the following movies, all of which came out in the same year as each other and concerned themselves with nearly the exact same thing.

1. 1997’s Dante’s Peak vs.

In Dante’s Peak, one of the many James Bonds and Sarah Connor from Terminator play a volcanologist and town mayor, respectively, caught up in the middle of a pending volcanic eruption in Washington. Like all good action movies there are laughs, a budding romance, some chills, a harrowing moment involving a dog (gasp) and, of course, a number of wicked explosions! It’s also nice to see how James Bond would fare if he ever had to fight nature in the middle of nowhere, Washington!

Volcano

In Volcano, everyone’s favorite anthropomorphic baseball glove, Tommy Lee Jones, plays a disgruntled (aren’t they all) Los Angeles authority in charge of the Office of Emergency Management. When a rapidly forming volcano forms in the La Brea Tar Pits, Jones and his colleagues must quickly formulate a plan to prevent the lava from flowing free through downtown Los Angeles. See, these two aren’t all that similar at all. Los Angeles isn’t anywhere near the country!

2. 1998s Deep Impact vs.

In this tale of catastrophic proportions, Téa Leoni and Frodo Baggins are just two of the every single inhabitant of Earth that have to deal with the reality of an ‘Extinction-Level-Event’ when a comet impacts the planet. A number of schemes are hatched in order to save the world, including sending astronauts to the comet to alter its trajectory with nuclear weapons. The plan goes awry and chaos ensues. Also Morgan Freeman was totally Obama before it was cool! I really don’t want to spoil this one for anyone that has been under a rock for 16 years, but let’s just say, there is a rather DEEP…impact!

Armageddon

In this wild ride, Matt Damon’s buddy Ben, the coach from Remember The Titans, Paul Coffey and John McClane are all whisked off an oil platform in the ocean in order to man a space ship (into space!) to use nuclear weapons in order to change the trajectory of, wait for it, an ASTEROID! Totally different right! The other big difference is that they’re not even astronauts, they’re just oil workers! Obviously the training montage and hilarity of Steve Buscemi as the worlds’ horniest geologist are well worth watching, and totally nothing like Deep Impact!