15 Pairs Of Dueling Movies & Their Respective Battles

“The Girl” vs. “Hitchcock”
Shared theme: Academy Award-winning director Alfred Hitchcock was kind of a creep
Released within: A month of each other (“The Girl” aired on HBO in October, “Hitchcock” debuted the following month)
Different approaches: “The Girl” is glum, glum, glum. It portrays Hitchcock’s relationship with Tippi Hedren (Sienna Miller) on the set of “The Birds” as a form of emotional terrorism, with Hitchcock cruelly directing her and (later) insisting she perform sexual favors on him. The director’s playfulness, both personally and professionally, is nowhere to be found. Instead, he’s characterized as a singularly morbid, sexually depraved goblin (Toby Jones does this kind of thing very well). The movie, too, shares nothing with the famous director it’s based on. Julian Jarrold, who directed part of the amazing “Red Riding” trilogy, brings zero zippiness to the piece and instead it just hangs there, oppressive and grey, like some huge storm cloud. “Hitchcock,” on the other hand, is effervescent to a fault. It concerns the director (here played by Anthony Hopkins, relishing every moment in his make-up and fat suit) and his attempts to get his low-budget horror classic “Psycho” made. He suspects his wife, Alma (Helen Mirren) is having an affair with a cheeky novelist (Danny Huston), and he is aided in his scheming by Ed Gein (Michael Wincott), the notorious serial killer that “Psycho” was based upon. It’s in this dreamy landscape that director Sascha Gervasi luxuriates in all things Hitchcock, appropriating many of the director’s signature shots and stylistic proclivities in a telling a tale that ultimately isn’t about anything more than the inner workings of a very difficult marriage.
Which was more successful? While well-reviewed by most critics, “The Girl” didn’t break any numbers for HBO (the recent Steven Soderbergh-directed “Behind the Candelabra” did). “Hitchcock” did pretty pitifully too: it made just over $6 million in its limited run this past fall, and failed to secure any major Academy Award nominations (the fact that Mirren was overlooked is criminal).
Which was better? It depends on what you were looking for, we suppose. If you wanted to see one of the greatest directors of all time vilified based on little more than hearsay from an actress whose career never reached the peaks again after working with Hitchcock (she would star in one more movie for him, then virtually disappear), then “The Girl” is for you. Personally, we found it too dour and lacking in anything truly insightful about the man. Sure, he could have been an A-class creep but there was also a jovial, incandescent side to him that rendered him a magnetic personality on and off the set. “Hitchcock,” for all its flaws (and there are many), at least tries to get at that part of the man’s essence, that “The Girl” ignored, And it is directed beautifully on the cheap, with a rousing score by Hitchcock super-fan Danny Elfman, who also provided the rejiggered score for Gus van Sant‘s “Psycho” remake.

“Robin Hood” vs “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves”
Shared Theme: Duh, the Robin Hood legend of not-so-Merrie Olde England
Released within: One month of each other — May/June 1991
Different approaches: Long before Russell Crowe’s take (which we just this second remembered exists, having forgotten about it literally the moment we stepped out of the theater) two Robins Hood battled it out for your 1991 dollar — Kevin Reynolds’ starry, overlong, self-serious ‘Prince of Thieves,’ starring Kevin Costner and the not-so starry, not-so-overlong but similarly self-serious “Robin Hood” starring Patrick Bergin. Why it apparently occurred to two separate production houses simultaneously that what the world needed was a gritty, mucky reimagining of the beloved Robin Hood story (Errol Flynn’s cheery technicolor version is still miles better than either of these two, or the Ridley Scott one), is anyone’s guess, but what they hell, both threw their feather-bedecked caps in the ring. The lower budgeted ‘Hood’ directed by John Irvin (who also directed the original Brit TV version of “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” sidenote fans) made some claims to greater historical accuracy, notably changing the villain from The Sheriff of Nottingham to some duke or lord played by Jurgen Prochnow, and didn’t do much in the way of reclaiming Uma Thurman’s Maid Marian from being anything more than a milky-skinned damsel in need of rescue. ‘Thieves,’ by contrast, packs its supporting cast with ringers, from Mary Elisabeth Mastrantonio’s spunky Maid Marian, to Morgan Freeman’s Azeem, Christian Slater’s Will Scarlett and, best of all, Alan Rickman’s snarly anti-Christmas Sheriff. Both films, however suffer from rather lumpen leads, with ‘Hood’‘s Patrick Bergin all frowny mustachioed seriousness, and Costner’s version a bit nimbler, but not a whole lot more appealing.
Which was more successful? “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves” by a country mile. raking in just shy of $400m worldwide despite being technically the second to screens, it was proof positive of the star power of Kevin Costner at the time that everyone flocked to a film that was so stodgily told. The Bergin ‘Hood,’ by contrast, all but disappeared to the point that it’s not even a popular enough search result for “Robin Hood” on IMDB to get into the top ten title matches.
Which was better? Oh, probably Kevin Reynolds’ ‘Thieves’ for its nice supporting turns and at least quasi-interesting egalitarian agenda (not just with Marian, but Freeman’s positive Moorish character too), but then again, the Irvin/Bergin version didn’t inflict a turgid yodelly dirge from Bryan Adams on the planet for which we wish a pox on the whole production. So yeah, screw ‘em both and watch 1938’s ludicrously entertaining “The Adventures of Robin Hood” instead.

Plenty more where that came from of course, among them “Friends With Benefits” facing off against “No Strings Attached” within a few short months (we were fans of neither the Will Gluck movie nor the Ivan Reitman film); the boffo idea of telling an animated superhero story from the villain’s point of view seemed to occur to the makers of “Megamind” and sequel-spawning “Despicable Me” at the very same time; while the rise of reality TV spawned a clash between “The Truman Show” and “Ed TV,” which ‘Truman’ won, obviously, but the latter’s not bad either; “Big” body swapped its way to big bucks in 1988, leaving “Vice Versa” in the dust; the following year Tom Hanks reoffended by appearing in “Turner and Hooch” seemingly minutes after James Belushi had graced screens in “K-9“; we can only imagine the horror of moviegoers expecting that nice Kevin James in “Paul Blart Mall Cop” and getting “Observe and Report” instead; poor old Tarsem Singh just can’t catch a break in regards to finding a film that someone else isn’t already working on and released the pretty but dumb as rocks “Immortals” the year after the ugly and dumb as fenceposts “Clash of the Titans“; and a certain long-distance runner wasn’t exactly lonely when two rival Steve Prefontaine biopics hit in as many years — “Prefontaine” and “Without Limits.”

And there are quite a few more instances of this phenomenon coming down the pike, though it wouldn’t be fair to pass judgment too far in advance: Angelina Jolie’s “Maleficent” is due out around this time next year but producer Neal Moritz has apparently got a rival “Sleeping Beauty” project developing too, albeit in a more comedic vein (which all feels very ‘Huntsman’ vs “Mirror Mirror” to us). Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s Whitey Bulger project faces competition in the form of “Black Mass” to which Johnny Depp was, then wasn’t and now maybe is again attached; Lady Di does a Hitchcock and gets her very own dueling biopics with the forthcoming “Diana” with Naomi Watts, and a more scurrilous take based on the book “Diana: Closely Guarded Secret” also supposedly gestating, though word’s gone a bit quiet on that after a flurry of initial casting rumors (Carey Mulligan, Charlize Theron, Ewan MacGregor all mooted at one point or another — not all, presumably, for the title role); the storied and troubled production of Terry Gilliam’s “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” got an unexpected rival when previous star Johnny Depp abandoned ship to mount his own “Don Quixote” but Gilliam’s has been postponed again, in a devastatingly surprising surprise, and we haven’t heard much since then of Depp’s either, so who knows?

Additionally, we’ll soon be seeing a second Linda Lovelace project after Amanda Seyfried‘s turn in “Lovelace” (our review here) when Malin Akerman deep throats “Inferno: The Linda Lovelace Story,” and the many Jeff Buckley projects that were at one time mooted will boil down to two, the already released “Greetings from Tim Buckley” and the developing, officially sanctioned “Mystery White Boy.” The Hollywood stand-off phenomenon is not going away any time soon. — Jessica Kiang, Drew Taylor