Cheesy Christmas films on Hallmark is expected as soon as it gets close to the festive season, but eagle-eyed viewers have spotted two that look weirdly alike. In fact, they're almost identical.
The films, Sister Swap: A Hometown Holiday and Sister Swap: Christmas in the City, were both released last year and star the same cast including real life sisters Kimberly Williams-Paisley and Ashley Williams in their Christmas themed stories.
The movies even had the same editor, Kristi Shimek, as well as some of the same scenes and dialogue' but shot from slightly different angles.
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Watch the Sister Swap: Christmas in the City trailer here:
Rick and Morty creator Dan Harmon was one of the first to spot the near identical films. Explaining his find on Instagram, he said: "There are two Hallmark movies called 'Sister Swap'. One is called Sister Swap: Christmas in the City, the other is Sister Swap: Hometown Holiday.
"So we thought oh cool it’s a franchise and there’s a sequel, which Sister Swap do we watch first? Well HERE’S THE THING. Both Sister Swaps are released in 2021. They are not sequels.
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"Both Sister Swaps are the same story, about sisters - played by real life sisters, who have to swap…cities. It should be noted that the sisters AND the cities AND THE MOVIES are, so far, indistinguishable.
The writer added that neither film mentions anything about the existence of the other - eerily similar - movie.
Harmon adds: "It’s not like one is a hillbilly and the other is a millionaire, that doesn’t matter, we don’t go to Hallmark for conflict. The crazy thing is that we also don’t go to Hallmark for experimentation on this level.
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"Nothing in the description of the movies says 'here’s the thing everybody'. The descriptions of each movie are honestly mostly excited that two real life sisters are playing sisters."
He continued: "I can’t keep talking about this, we just started watching, I can’t spend all night posting about it. We keep going back and forth between the movies."
Harmon elaborated on one of the scenes that made the films different, showing they are related to each other rather than just copies: "In one of the movies, one of the sisters has a full flashback about her relationship with the other sister. In the other sister’s movie, you don’t get a different version of the same flashback.
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"You just don’t get a f****** flashback in that one. In both of the movies, they spend 1 minute trying on hats but in ONE of the movies, they also try on glasses. We’re freaking out."
Others who had spotted the same similarities were straight in to comment on the discovery. One film fan wrote: "My boyfriend and I have been fully sucked into the black hole that is sister swap and we can’t thank you enough."
Another had the same thoughts as many of us, as they wrote: "Same director? Different scripts? Same scripts, different directors? Was the production crew privy to 2 different releases? Just editing magic? So many questions!"
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Solving the mystery of the two films similarities and why they seem the same but aren't, Sister Swaps star Kimberly Williams-Paisley stepped in.
She explained: "We wanted to do something outside the box for the genre but also stay in the genre, and my sister came up with this brilliant idea of two films that take place in the same time frame and sometimes overlap, and it took us years to figure out the puzzle, and then, Hallmark finally let us DO IT."
Well that's another one on our Christmas list!
Topics: Christmas, Film and TV
Niamh Spence