One film is about two heterosexual firefighters who pretend to be gay to claim a financial benefit and the other is about, well, two heterosexual firefighters who pretend to be gay to claim a financial benefit. ( dpa )
But on Monday, the Australian producers of the 2004 film Strange Bedfellows announced that they had withdrawn their complaint of plagiarism against the US producers of the 2007 film I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry.
Strange Bedfellows was a moderately successful film starring Paul "Crocodile Dundee" Hogan, while the cast of the box-office hit Chuck and Larry was led by Adam Sandler.
Strange Bedfellows producer Shana Levine told The Sydney Morning Herald that sheer coincidence explained the glaring similarities.
"Even though it's unusual for two projects to be similar, that appears to be the case," she said.
The paper said that the Australians had agreed to drop their court case after they saw an early copy of the Chuck and Larry script that predated the Strange Bedfellows project.
"It was never about money," Levine said. "It was about being sure our film hadn't been copied."