Copycat Cover: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}
▲[[File:CopycatCover_6027.png|frame|Subtle.]]
[[Covers Always Lie]] taken up by marketing.
▲[[Covers Always Lie]] taken up by marketing. [[Copycat Cover|Copycat Covers]] tend to naturally occur during the release of more popular and better movies and games, and their aesthetic similarity seems intended to confuse less observant customers. This is especially common with stories that were originally in the public domain (Disney is a major victim of this) but might also be done retroactively long after the knockoff's release.
Copycat covers can usually be spied out by being much lower quality and suspiciously lower in price.
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{{examples}}
== Film ==
* ''Pirates XXX'' was make to bank on the success of ''[[Pirates of the Caribbean]]'', by appealing to the crowd who would have liked the [[Disney]] movies if not for the fact that you couldn't really masturbate to them (unless your tastes were ''really weird''). Then it gets
** ''Flesh Gordon'', similarly, started as a [[Parallel Porn Titles|porn knockoff]] of ''[[Flash Gordon Serial
* In the US, a studio called [[The Asylum]] is notorious for releasing [[The Mockbuster|mockbusters]] that shamelessly rip off not only the movies themselves, but their posters as well.
** Recently, they've been hit with a hefty lawsuit from Fox over ''[[The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951 film)||The Day the Earth Stopped]]''. It doesn't help that both titles translate the same way in French.
* ''[[Batman:
** To clarify, it's nearly identical to the 1989 Batman cover (logo on black background), except it's a red version of the simpler bat logo from the '60s series.
* As seen above, ''[[Basic Instinct]]'' was ripped off by ''Betrayed'', which has also been described as "''Basic Instinct'' [[Dissimile|without sex]]".
* The cover of the ''[[Strangers
* Hilariously, the newest DVD releases of ''[[Near Dark]]'' model their covers after the ''[[Twilight (
* Similar to the ''[[Near Dark]]'' example, the thriller ''Summer's Blood'' (aka ''Summer's Moon''; it was even given a copycat title!), starring <s>[[Role Association|Alice Cullen]]</s> Ashley Greene as a woman being stalked by a family of serial killers, has a poster designed to cash in on the fact that Greene was in ''[[Twilight (
* Deliberately invoked for comic effect with the poster for the 2017 film ''[[The Hitman's Bodyguard]]'', which [http://www.justjared.com/2017/04/18/ryan-reynolds-hitmans-bodyguard-poster-spoofs-whitney-houstons-the-bodyguard/ copied the poster] for the 1992 film ''[[The Bodyguard]]''; on it, [[Ryan Reynolds]] is shown carrying [[Samuel L. Jackson]] in exactly the same way as [[Kevin Costner]] carried [[Whitney Houston]] in the original against a very similar background, along with using the same angle, and color scheme, and photo effects, with the title in the same font.
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** Or "Cheery Oats," which are virtually identical to the more popular Cheerios. Given that Cheerios are also made from oats, it's difficult to tell why there hasn't been a lawsuit.
* Decaf coffee carafes in restaurants tend to have orange handles. This is because Sanka, a once-dominant brand of decaffeinated coffee, used orange on its labels and its carafes. Although Sanka is almost a forgotten memory (at least in restaurants,) the mighty orange handle soldiers on.
* Crisps (potato chips) in the UK are generally colour-coded by flavour: red is Ready Salted, green is Cheese & Onion, blue is Salt & Vinegar, pink is Prawn Cocktail, brown is Barbecue Beef (or similar).
** Except for Walkers - the dominant brand - who switch green and blue...
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== Literature ==
* This is standard industry procedure with books. Whenever a movie or TV adaptation of a book comes out (or of a book on the same topic, or a completely unrelated topic ''by the same author''), a new edition of the book will almost always be printed with a Copycat Cover and a blurb on it somewhere hawking the movie or show.
* An example that's laced with [[Hypocritical Humor]]: Nancy Stouffer, of ''[[The Legend of Rah and
* Pretty much every vampire book published in the last five years has a cover that looks exactly like ''[[Twilight (
* Probably to indicate shared elements (a humorous take on a British empire), the ''[[Space Captain Smith]]'' novels have similar covers to the British ''[[Flashman]]'' covers.
* Odd example in which the two books have the same title and the copied book is fairly obscure. ''The Big Con'' is a book about con artists that inspired ''[[The Sting]]'' and has a reissue cover that looks like [http://www.amazon.com/Big-Story-Confidence-Man/dp/0385495382/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1301936820&sr=1-1 this]. ''The Big Con'' is also the title of a work attacking conservative economic philosophies, which has used [https://web.archive.org/web/20101229072238/http://www.progressivebookclub.com/var/pbc/images/cover_the_big_con1.jpg this cover] and later [http://di105.shoppingshadow.com/images/di/36/51/5f/4b306d6e335856486e75644547745237497077-149x149-0-0.jpg this one]{{Dead link}}.
* ''The Quantum Thief'', a post-Singularity [[Space Opera]] was first published in England and was given [http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Thief-Hannu-Rajaniemi/dp/0765329492/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1301937034&sr=1-1 this cover] for the United States printing, which is very similar in font and design to the covers for books in [[The Culture]] series- [http://www.amazon.com/Surface-Detail-Iain-M-Banks/dp/0316123404/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_1 compare].
== Live Action TV ==
* Some copies of the History Channel's ''The 300 Spartans'' have been modified to look like the cover of ''[[
* The title card for the [[MTV]] reality show ''[[
== Video Games ==
* ''Billy the Wizard'', a knockoff of the official ''[[Harry Potter (
* An awful lot of so-called [[Shoddy Knockoff Product|"1000-in-1" ROM-loading video game systems]] mimic the look of consoles current at the time.
* ''Pirates'' was a [[
* ''[[Myst|Pyst]]'' and its planned sequel ''Driven'' had the excuse of explicitly identifying themselves as parodies, and if the developers had had the money for court costs they would probably have won the lawsuit that was filed against them. They did not have the money, so ''Driven'' was never made.
* A promotional CGI render Capcom made for ''[[Resident Evil 4]]'' shows [[Femme Fatale|Ada Wong]] posing similar to the way Anne Parillaud did for the ''[[La Femme Nikita]]'' movie poster.
* The cover artwork for the original ''[[Metal Gear
* The cover artwork for the NES version of ''[[Contra (
* The cover artwork for ''[[Double Dragon]] Advance'' is based on a promotional still of [[Bruce Lee]] and [[Chuck Norris]] from ''[[Way of the Dragon]]''.
* [http://flyers.arcade-museum.com/?page=flyer&db=videodb&id=4090&image=1 This flyer] for the Konami arcade game ''Majū no Ōkoku'' (released as ''Dark Adventure'' in the United States and ''Devil World'' in other regions) is a blatant copycat of the poster for ''[[Return of the Jedi]]'' (appropriately enough, with the game's [[Indiana Jones]]-ripoff protagonist standing in for [[Harrison Ford]]).
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* A German company named [[Dingo Pictures]] makes these regularly, with badly animated knockoffs of Disney stories and even ''character designs''. A good number of these were released as PlayStation 2 <s>games</s> [[Minigame Game|minigame collections]] by the infamous Phoenix Games.
* Goodtimes Video does this against any entry in the [[Disney Animated Canon]] based on a [[Public Domain Character]].
* The posters and DVD covers for the ''[[Jimmy Neutron]]'' and ''[[Hey Arnold!]]'' movies both show the same basic art of the protagonist and his friends in the foreground with the film's villain as an [[Evil Overlooker]], with the only major difference being that Jimmy holds a weapon and Arnold doesn't. This was made especially evident when the movies' DVDs were reissued together as a Double Feature DVD release.
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{{reflist}}
[[Category:Cover Tropes]]
[[Category:
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