The Forgotten Action Movie Speed KILLED
How Blown Away Became Speed's Unlucky Sibling
When we talk about twin movies, usually it's a story of winners and losers. Everyone remembers Turner & Hooch, the buddy comedy starring Tom Hanks and a slobbery, lovable dog who's also a witness to a crime, but no one remembers K-9, which featured Jim Belushi as a cop marked for death, paired with his lovable canine companion who gets into scrapes trying to help. Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves? Notorious but long-lived, whereas the John Irvin-directed Robin Hood - which starred Patrick Bergin and Uma Thurman as Robin and Maid Marian - may as well not exist.
The list goes on. For every Tombstone, there's a Wyatt Earp. Every rose (A Bug's Life) has its thorn (Antz). Volcano and Dante's Peak, Deep Impact and Armageddon, Olympus Has Fallen and White House Down. Heck, you can go all the way back to the salad days of Hollywood's Golden Age and see that Abe Lincoln in Illinois tried to go toe-to-toe with John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln just a few months after its 1939 premiere.
So, why do twin films happen so regularly? The short, boring answer is that it's mostly just coincidence, but that also perhaps undermines the influence of contemporary and historical contexts. There may not be a conscious want to emulate the competition with many of these twin productions, but they are each the product of a filmmaking zeitgeist. Is it really so strange that multiple movies about an asteroid collision with Earth were both made and released in 1998 when, in actuality, they're typical of that post-Cold War, existential-disaster vibe that dominated so much of nineties cinema? Is it so preposterous that two buddy-cop-dog movies dropped within shooting distance of each other in the twilight of the 1980s, the decade that gave us New Coke and Alf?
There are occasions when competition is by design - where a studio has been sitting on a script, hears about a similarly premised project making buzz, and tries to beat their rival to the punch - but most of the time, it's a product of cinematic trends and contemporary influence.
Speed and Blown Away are both products of the same era - action movies assembled in the inexorable shadow of Die Hard (the former even being directed by Die Hard's cinematographer, Jan de Bont) and informed by headlines that dwelled on the same themes of violence, militancy, and terrorism. It's the same context that birthed Patriot Games, Executive Decision, and Sudden Death. Blown Away just had the misfortune of hitting without a rest period, and doing so in the wake of one of the more esteemed descendants of John McTiernan's action masterpiece.
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