10 Movies Everyone Confuses With Other Movies

Good luck telling them apart.

Olympus Has Fallen White House Down
FilmDistrict & Sony Pictures Releasing

It's fair to say that there are only so many movies our brains can remember at any given time, and so it's common for like-minded films to blur together in our memories.

But sometimes two films in particular become confused in our minds due to a premise that's shocking similar, whether a result of pure coincidence or something a little more suspicious.

"Twin films" are a significant phenomenon in the world of cinema, whereby two similar projects enter production in quick succession, often resulting in them both racing to hit the big screen first.

These 10 sets of movies, whether directly competing projects or not, all wound up being confused with one another due to their kindred narratives.

And because audiences generally don't want to pay to see the same movie twice, it's telling that in most cases only one of the movies (at most) was a major critical and/or commercial success.

In many cases it didn't help that both films were so thoroughly mediocre that audiences weren't ever inspired to remember one over the other, ensuring they blended into an easily forgotten mass of whatever in viewers' brains...

10. No Strings Attached & Friends With Benefits

Olympus Has Fallen White House Down
Paramount & Sony

If you can tell these two 2011 rom-coms apart, give yourself a firm pat on the back.

Released just six months apart, No Strings Attached and Friends with Benefits both follow two sets of young, attractive people who enter into no-strings sexual relationships without any interest in committed romance. Inevitably, feelings abound.

To make matters more complicated, the films star Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis respectively - who, in addition to looking alike, co-starred together in Black Swan the year prior - while their romantic partners are played by the not-that-dissimilar Ashton Kutcher and Justin Timberlake.

Tellingly, No Strings Attached was originally written under the title Friends with Benefits, but changed after the producers realised a "rival" project was in production.

Ultimately both films scored mixed reviews from critics but performed well at the box office, yet are ultimately such beige, forgettable rom-coms based on a similar premise that it's extremely difficult to tell them apart without a quick Google search.

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Contributor

Stay at home dad who spends as much time teaching his kids the merits of Martin Scorsese as possible (against the missus' wishes). General video game, TV and film nut. Occasional sports fan. Full time loon.