12 Blatant Copycat Movie Pairs (And Which Was Better)

Maybe it was something to do with the impending millennium and all the doomsayers predicting the end of the world as we know it, but disaster films were the craze du jour back in the late 90s. In 1998 two films were vying for the title of top apocalypse porn of the summer – Paramount’s Deep Impact and Touchstone’s Armageddon.

Both movies are about extinction-event-level asteroids about to destroy the planet but according to Deep Impact screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin their suspiciously similar subject matter isn’t just mere coincidence.

He claims that a Disney executive (Disney being Touchstone’s parent company) basically plagiarised his script while he was discussing it during a lunch meeting and lo and behold, Armageddon was announced a few months later.

Which One Was Better?

Neither are great films, unless you’re bang into watching the world get decimated by comets. Armageddon has that pure entertainment factor and a sh*t-tonne of explosions (it is a Michael Bay film after all), but according to very clever science people Deep Impact is the more scientifically accurate of the two if that’s what you look for in an end of world movie.

Mind, Armageddon did get nominated for seven Razzies and – even more damning – unleashed the worst ever Aerosmith song upon the world so for that reason alone we’re leaning towards Deep Impact as the better movie.