Truth is often stranger than fiction, and in the world of Hollywood, the production of movies can sometimes be more interesting than the content of the films themselves. Not to be confused with parodies, mockbusters or inter-genre filmmaking, the term “twin films” refers to an occasion when two uncannily similar movies are released within a relatively close time frame during the same year.

Twin films usually share an eerily specific narrative or plot threads, and, on occasion, even feature the same actors and behind-the-scenes creatives as well. It’s like Hollywood releases the same film twice only a few months apart. Though one would believe the chances of a set of twin films popping up would be one in a million, their inceptions are typically more common than one would think.

RELATED: Movie Twists That Actually Caught Audiences Off-Guard

One of the most famous examples of this phenomenon is the duo of Deep Impact and Armageddon, which were released not even two months apart during the summer of 1998. Both movies follow ragtag groups of astronauts heading out to space to stop a comet from causing an extinction-level disaster on Earth. Despite launching so close together, both movies were tremendous financial successes, though only the Michael Bay-directed Armageddon seems to have left a lasting impression on pop culture since then.

A recurring oddity, disaster-oriented blockbusters tend to appear as twin films fairly consistently. Dante’s Peak and Volcano presented a supervolcano double feature only a year earlier in 1997, and in 2013, both White House Down and Olympus Has Fallen revolved around a terrorist siege of the White House.

RELATED: How Important Are Theaters to the Blockbuster Experience?

The twin films Olympus Has Fallen and White House Down.

When a film is being developed, creatives often shop their projects across multiple studios to get their movies made. One writer, director, or producer may get picked up by one studio to do similar work to another prior project after being canned from their original place of work. Think James Gunn’s transition from Guardians of the Galaxy to The Suicide Squad — two comedic franchises about criminal misfits teaming together to fight for the greater good — on a much faster time track.

On that note, twin films also get made as competitive acts of industrial espionage. One producer may drop in on a pitch meeting, like the idea, then proceed to make a movie fleshed out of the bones of the premise. Meanwhile, the original screenplay and/or creative may get greenlit at another studio, eventually setting the two separate movies on a collision course later down the road.

Recalling a pitch about a feudalistic ant colony while working at Disney, Jeffrey Katzenberg would go on to create Antz for Dreamworks in 1998. The same year, his friend John Lasseter would release the narratively homogenous A Bug’s Life for Disney, leading to a blistering fallout between the two pioneers of CGI animation.

RELATED: Pixar Hints at Classic Toy Story Easter Egg

Similarly, one studio may want to create direct competition with another after losing a bid on the rights to a project, leading them to buy out a different book or screenplay to adapt to still get the movie they wanted to be made. While Netflix collaborated with Jerry Media and Matte Projects, the social media company responsible for the ill-fated Fyre Festival, to develop Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened, Hulu created their own documentary on the subject, Fyre Fraud. As Netflix's release date approached, Hulu rushed out its doc without any advertising to get the drop on Netflix by four days.

Interestingly, the 1974 movie The Towering Inferno is the exact opposite of this situation. Though initially set to adapt two different novels about a burning building, Warner Bros. and Fox teamed up on The Towering Inferno to avoid cannibalizing profits by their similarly themed movies.

RELATED: Warner Max: Warner Bros. Launches New Film Division for HBO Max

The similar Snow White movies Snow White and the Huntsman and Mirror Mirror

These conjectures are all based on original ideas or properties whose rights belong to one entity. Many twin films can end up getting made due to different studios choosing to adapt works in the public domain at joint happenstance. Mirror Mirror and Snow White and the Huntsman both adapted the classic Grimm Brothers’ fairy tale in 2012, Paramount and MGM’s Hercules contended with Summit’s The Legend of Hercules in 2014 and 1991 saw Kevin Costner's Prince of Thieves dueling with Patrick Bergin's Robin Hood. 2016 was also slated to host two Jungle Book movies, though Andy Serkis’ Mowgli: King of the Jungle was eventually pushed back an additional two years by Warner Bros.

Perhaps the likeliest reason twin films get made is due to their themes’ widespread presence in their contemporary zeitgeists. Trembling at what Y2K could unleash on the world, the last years of the twentieth century were rife with conspiratorial musings regarding fear of technology and the idea of unknowingly living in a computer simulation. Though each unique in their own right, The Matrix, eXistenZ, and The Thirteenth Floor collectively illustrate this strange pattern of thought in 1999. In the same vein, 1978 was flooded with movies critical of the Vietnam War with the releases of Coming Home, Go Tell the Spartans, and Deer Hunter, with Apocalypse Now following up the year after.

This fascinating phenomenon isn’t just a modern trend either. As indicated by The Scarlet Empress and The Rise of Catherine the Great, two biopics of the titular ruler from 1934, Hollywood has been creating twin films since the early years of the movie industry. Transcending genres, themes and even quality, multiple sets of twin films continue to come out every year, and likely will until the end of time.

KEEP READING: Matrix 4: Trailer, Release Date, Plot and News to Know (So Far)