On March 21, Netflix released the first season of "3 Body Problem," its glitzy adaptation of Chinese novelist Liu Cixin's Hugo Award-winning sci-fi trilogy. If this news sounds familiar, it should – in mid-January, Amazon Prime dropped its own version of Cixin's novel, "Three-Body." The Chinese-produced series is 30 episodes long and has received almost no attention in the United States. How common is it for studios to produce different versions of what amounts to the same story? Here are five more instances of the best in copycat entertainment, with our pick for the better of the two.
'Fail Safe' (1964) vs. 'Dr. Strangelove' (1964)
One of the more notorious legal battles in studio history was about a bleak nuclear war story. "Fail Safe" is about a computer glitch that sends U.S. nuclear bombers into the Soviet Union to deliver their payloads. Henry Fonda, who plays the president, spends much of the film on the phone with his Soviet counterpart trying to avert doomsday. Stanley Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove," in development at the same time, follows a deranged Air Force general who launches a surprise nuclear strike against the Soviets. Kubrick's film, a magnificent dark comedy, is better remembered, but "Fail Safe," an unflinching parable with a gut punch of an ending, is probably the one that modern audiences most need to see.
'Candy' (2022) vs. 'Love & Death' (2023)
Exactly how two different streaming networks ended up adapting the same decades-old true crime yarn and then releasing them within a year of one another is a mystery. Both shows are about Candy Montgomery, an unassuming Texas housewife who killed her lover's wife with an ax. In Hulu's "Candy," Montgomery is played by Jessica Biel and her victim, Betty Gore, by Melanie Lynskey. In Max's "Love & Death," Elizabeth Olsen takes on the role of Montgomery and Lily Rabe is Betty Gore. Despite Max's pedigree as the king of limited series and Olsen's star power, the quirkier, offbeat Hulu version, which leaned heavily into the workaday tedium of Montgomery's marriage to Pat (a wonderfully droll Timothy Simons) is the more satisfying to watch.
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'Dopesick' (2021) vs. 'Painkiller' (2023)
These two shows about the opioid epidemic are adapted from similar source material. Hulu's "Dopesick," which aired on Hulu in the U.S., is adapted from journalist Beth Macy's "Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors and the Drug Company That Addicted America," while "Painkiller" is based on a New Yorker article, "The Family That Built an Empire of Pain." Both are loosely fictionalized accounts of the creation of Purdue Pharma's drug Oxycontin, a painkiller with misleading marketing and sales methods that helped fuel the ongoing tragedy of opioid overdoses in the United States. "Dopesick" is the clear choice here, helped by virtuoso, heartbreaking performances from Michael Keaton and Kaitlyn Dever as victims of the drug's addictive powers.
'One Day' (2011) vs. 'One Day' (2024)
Netflix got some chuckles when it announced its adaptation of David Nicholls' 2009 novel "One Day," about a will-they-or-won't-they pair of friends, Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew, as they drift through young adulthood. The novel received a critically unloved film adaptation in 2011 starring Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess, which The Guardian said was "slushy, mawkish and weirdly humorless." But the Netflix series, starring Leo Woodall and Ambika Mod as the star-crossed pair, is a triumph. Using the book's structure of popping in on them on July 15th across more than two decades, the series is funny, insightful and moving.
'Cocaine Godmother: The Griselda Blanco Story' (2024) vs. 'Griselda' (2017)
The team behind the smash Netflix hit "Narcos" decided to give the most famous woman in drug cartel history the limited series treatment. Starring Sofia Vergara as Griselda Blanco, the series begins with her fleeing from Colombia to Miami with her three sons, where she attempts against all odds to create her own cocaine empire. "Griselda" does not exactly reinvent the wheel, featuring the familiar rise-and-fall beats of a mafia tale, but Vergara's chilling performance holds it all together much better than the 2017 film adaption of Blanco's life, "Cocaine Godmother," starring Catherine Zeta-Jones as the Miami drug boss. IndieWire's most fulsome praise of the little-known, critically panned film was to call it "not entirely unwatchable."
