Ron Howard wants you to know he definitely didn’t rip off one of his forgotten movies: “That’s frustrating for me”
While he’s directed plenty of adaptations and true-life stories, nobody would accuse Ron Howard of being a rip-off merchant, which probably explains why he was so desperate for everyone to know that he was not, in fact, a rip-off merchant.
You can’t really look at anything the two-time Academy Award winner had directed and immediately conjure memories of a suspiciously similar and vastly superior movie, apart from the one time when it happened, despite his protestations that it was a coincidence more than anything else.
Throw a dart at a board marked with Howard’s filmography, and there are mostly no hints of plagiarism. Far and Away? A period piece and a passion project. The Dilemma? Formulaic shite. Hillbilly Elegy? Best not mention that one. Grand Theft Auto? Cheap and cheerful, but an original story. Solo? A spinoff nobody asked for, and he only made it because the original directors were fired.
However, when you land on 1999’s EDtv, it’s OK to raise an eyebrow. After all, Matthew McConaughey stars as the title character, who finds himself subjected to every second of his existence being recorded, broadcast, and beamed into millions of homes worldwide, making him a global celebrity and complicating his personal life when the cracks in the façade begin to show.
Sounds an awful lot like The Truman Show, where Jim Carrey stars as the title character, who finds himself subjected to every second of his existence being recorded, broadcast, and beamed into millions of homes worldwide, making him a global celebrity and complicating his personal life when the cracks in the façade begin to show.
Nobody was directly accusing screenwriters Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel of directly copying Andrew Niccol’s homework, even if The Truman Show had been in development since the early 1990s and was released nine months before EDtv. They were still too similar for a lot of people’s liking, and matters weren’t helped that Howard’s movie was nowhere near as insightful or entertaining as Peter Weir’s.
“That’s frustrating for me,” the filmmaker admitted just days before his picture bowed in cinemas. “And I like The Truman Show. But the movies are barely related. EDtv is contemporary. It’s reality-based, and it’s very funny. At least, I think it is, and the audiences have been laughing hard. The Truman Show is more of a drama, and almost science fiction.”
These audiences that Howard claimed were left rolling in the aisles by his return to comedy evidently didn’t show up and pay for the privilege of seeing EDtv on the big screen, since it tanked horrifically at the box office, failing to recoup even half of its hefty $80 million budget, and topping out with $230 million less in the coffers than The Truman Show.
Twin films are a recurring phenomenon, and there always has to be a winner. That said, battles are rarely as one-sided as this, with Carrey wiping the floor with McConaughey.
