Double trouble

Sherlock Holmes movies. They're like buses. You wait forever for a decent one to arrive (the last notable effort was 1985's Young Sherlock Holmes), and then suddenly two come along at once. Of course, when it was announced recently that rival Hollywood studios were shepherding competing Holmes movies into the works, the news was greeted as something of a ghastly anomaly. On the one hand, we have the straight-faced action adventure movie from Guy Ritchie (RocknRolla), a prestige project with Robert Downey Jr in the title role, based upon an upcoming graphic novel by Lionel Wigram. On the other, we have the slapstick wild card, a comedy blockbuster from Judd Apatow (Knocked Up), starring the inimitable Sacha Baron Cohen (Borat) as Holmes and Will Ferrell (Anchorman) as Watson. Yet "how could this happen?" came the cry of disbelief. How did it happen? How did something as precious as a creative idea get cloned? Is there nothing sacred in Hollywood anymore?

Typically, this is hardly a new predicament for Tinseltown. A quick glance back to 2005 will remind us of the heady battle that ensued between two duelling Truman Capote biopics. Both movies focused on the period in and around Capote's conception and writing of In Cold Blood. Yet while one film boasted a star-studded cast, including Gwyneth Paltrow, Sandra Bullock and Sigourney Weaver, the other merely had Philip Seymour Hoffman and a squeaky voice. The star-studded version was called Infamous, starred the English stage actor Toby Jones in the lead role, and was seen by many as critically superior to the Hoffman version, simply called Capote. And yet the latter movie opened 11 months before Infamous, and captured all available limelight and Capote-based hysteria. By the time Infamous crashed and burnt at the opening weekend box office, with a paltry $450,000 (Dh1,650,000), Capote had already taken an impressive $42.5 million (Dh156 million) in the US alone.

Before that, the killer asteroid movies Deep Impact and Armageddon had famously faced each other in a summer 1998 box office battle. There had been two cartoon ant movies (Antz and A Bug's Life), two Wyatt Earp movies (Tombstone and Wyatt Earp), two Mars mission movies (Red Planet and Mission to Mars), two volcano movies (Dante's Peak and Volcano), two Christopher Columbus movies (1492: Conquest of Paradise and Christopher Columbus: The Discovery), and even two competing biopics about the American Olympic runner Steve Prefontaine (Without Limits and Prefontaine).

In the midst of all this, in the early Nineties, two apocalyptic virus movies were rushing into production. One was Crisis in the Hot Zone, starring Robert Redford and Jodie Foster, and directed by Ridley Scott. The other was Outbreak, starring Dustin Hoffman. I met the late great "super-agent" Jay Maloney (who counted Spielberg and Scorsese among his clients) at the time, when his company was representing the Hot Zone team. He was extremely political about the situation, and said that the competition wasn't a problem, that he didn't know where it had started, but that Hollywood was a small community where ideas were common currency.

In the past, of course, rival studios had made similar movies, like gangster flicks such as The Public Enemy and Scarface, or artistic epics such as Lust for Life (Kirk Douglas as Van Gogh) and The Agony and the Ecstasy (Charlton Heston as Michelangelo). But this was different, it was the wholesale cloning of a high concept pitch that was then speedily produced and released by whatever actors, writers and director were willing and available at the time. Maloney finished his rumination with the warning that nothing was over until it was over, and that a movie wasn't completed until it was rolling through the projector of the local multiplex.

As it happened, The Hot Zone was soon overtaken by Outbreak and subsequently stalled and collapsed, leaving the latter Dustin Hoffman movie to storm the box office alone. And yet the lesson to be learnt, which is the case in all competing movie scenarios, is that time is of the essence. Or, to put it bluntly, first out of the gate is the winner. Brian DePalma's Mission to Mars, for instance, an awful pseudo-spiritual sci-fi farce with nods to Kubrick and aspirations of grandeur, was released in March 2000, trouncing the similar (and equally risible) Red Planet, which starred Val Kilmer and Carrie Anne Moss, and was released 10 months later. Similarly, Peter Weir's innovative reality TV satire, The Truman Show, was released in June 1998, beating Ron Howard's copycat flop Ed TV, which came out nearly a year later. Ditto for competing geological disaster flicks, Dante's Peak (the earlier winner) and Volcano (the later loser).

Despite the smooth words of agents, and the united front portrayed by the industry, this ostensible race to the finish line can produce a cut-throat ethos in the competing filmmaking camps. Most famously, in 1993, the two Wyatt Earp movies went mano-a-mano in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where they were in production. Here the money men in Kurt Russell's Tombstone bought up all the vintage costumes in the surrounding area, causing lengthy delays to Kevin Costner's Wyatt Earp, as scouts for that movie had to fly to Europe for extra outfits. Unsurprisingly, Costner's movie, second out of the gate, eventually bombed, making only $25 million (Dh 91 million) on a budget of a then whopping $65 million (Dh238 million).

In some cases, like The Hot Zone, the sheer career-numbing fear of bringing up the rear, and facing the possible ignominy of being beaten to the multiplex, will force many a competing movie project simply to back down. The Director Baz Luhrmann (Moulin Rouge) famously dropped out of his long-gestating Alexander the Great (starring Leonardo DiCaprio) when Oliver Stone revealed that he had raced into production with his own Alexander, starring Colin Farrell. Similarly, Mr Hughes, a thoughtful biopic about Howard Hughes, starring Jim Carrey and directed by Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight) simply faded from production schedules when it was announced that Martin Scorsese's Hughes biopic, The Aviator, was starting to take shape.

Clearly, on this evidence, entering the duelling movies arena is a high-risk strategy that will most likely involve the complete humiliation of one of the participants, either at the box office itself, or even before that in the form of a withering production collapse. And yet, rather than witnessing a decrease in copycat productions, we seem to be in a golden era right now. Here, as movies become prohibitively expensive to produce and original ideas increasingly scarce, desperate filmmakers are often relying on formula, remakes, sequels, safe-bets and, crucially, each other's ideas, for inspiration. Thus, recently, in what can hardly be described as "pure coincidence", we've had two potholing horror movies (The Cave and The Descent), two comedy penguin movies (Happy Feet and Surf's Up), two 1950s Hollywood noirs (The Black Dahlia and Hollywoodland), and, my personal favourite, two computer-generated rat-in-peril movies (Flushed Away and Ratatouille).

It's hardly surprising, then, that the makers of the two Sherlock Holmes movies seem remarkably unphased by the news that they're involved in a fight to the finish. By now a Tinseltown norm, they merely ignore the competing movie, and focus all intention, instead, on what's great about their own project. Thus Etan Cohen, the writer of the Baron Cohen (no relation) movie, has repeatedly stressed the amount of research that's going into his script, and how this will be comedy adventure supported by a bedrock of authenticity. "Looking at my desk," he told a recent interviewer, "I have books about Victorian forensics, all the stories, and dictionaries for Victorian slang... We're trying to write a giant comedy while at the same time staying true to the mechanics of a Sherlock Holmes story."

Ritchie, alternatively, has promised that his project will offer a "contemporary" take on "an intellectual action hero". "He's an intellectual superhero, and I'm inspired by that," he said recently. His producer Joel Silver (The Matrix), however, was far more blunt, far more money. "It's James Bond in 1891," he said. "It's a big wild action movie!" And still Ritchie, possibly perturbed by all this talk of competing movies, let it be known that there was only going to be one top dog in the Holmes movie race. "They don't even have a script yet," he told the newspaper USA Today, referring to the comedy Holmes production status. "We are way ahead of them!"

And with that one minor but significant broadside comes the very real possibility that Ritchie's movie, first from the blocks, will be top of the box office in 2009, that Robert Downey Jr will be the one saying "Elementary, my dear Watson," and that Sacha Baron Cohen's comedy, though greatly researched, might indeed flounder in the commercial doldrums of second banana status. If, that is, the movie is completed at all.