Copycat Cover

Subtle.

Covers Always Lie taken up by marketing. 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.

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.

Copycat covers can usually be spied out by being much lower quality and suspiciously lower in price.

A tactic often employed by The Mockbuster. See also: Trend Covers, Trailer Spoof. "The Breakfast Club" Poster Homage is a Sub-Trope.

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Examples:

Film — Animation

• 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 minigame collections by the infamous Phoenix Games.
• GoodTimes Entertainment does this against any entry in the Disney Animated Canon based on a Public Domain Character.
• The posters and DVD covers for Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius and Hey Arnold! The Movie 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.
• This◊ is, of course, a poster for Brave. This◊ is the cover to the direct-to-DVD cartoon Braver. Note that the actual cartoon is traditional cel-animation, the lead character wears a pink dress, and she isn't even a redhead, she's blonde. The film was originally released six years earlier as A Fairy Tale Christmas, and this cover◊ gives a better idea of what it's actually like.
• An infamous example occured with the Canadian film (the first Canadian All-CGI Cartoon film, at that) The Legend Of Sarila. In America, it was marketed as Frozen Land and given a Frozen-like cover so obvious that Disney filed against them. In this case, it worked against the film because many people passed it off as a mockbuster of Frozen, when the film itself was well-received. The film has nothing to do with Frozen or The Snow Queen. It's actually a film about a Inuit girl living in 1910 Northern Canada.
• The hand-drawn animated film Help! I'm a Fish was shown in US theaters in 2001. Even though the two films have little in common, a 2006 DVD release gave Help! a cover that made it look like a Shark Tale mockbuster: It was retitled A Fish Tale, and the logo got wavy yellow text like that of Shark Tale. The illustration was replaced with a group of CGI marine creatures, including a prominent shark, and no longer emphasizes that the three main characters are transformed humans. Compare the original cover◊, the "Fish Tale" cover◊ and this Shark Tale cover.

Film — Live Action

• Pictured atop this page is how Basic Instinct was ripped off by Betrayed, which has also been described as "Basic Instinct without sex".
• 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 weird — the director was so proud of his porno that he made an R-rated, sex-free version for public viewing.
• Flesh Gordon, similarly, started as a porn knockoff of Flash Gordon, but the director was so proud of the special effects that he cut it down to an R and released it in theaters.
• In the US, a studio called The Asylum is notorious for releasing mockbusters that shamelessly rip off not only the movies themselves, but their posters as well. They've been hit with a hefty lawsuit from Fox over The Day the Earth Stopped. It doesn't help that both titles translate the same way in French.
• Batman: The Movie received a DVD cover that looked extremely similar to the Batman (1989) cover, only with a red version of the simpler 60's Batman logo instead of the newer yellow one. While that one at least has a parodic element to it that reflects the 1966 film's humorous tone, there's also another one that looks similar to the poster for The Dark Knight, which doesn't really fit the movie's campiness.
• The Blues Brothers had an alternate cover showing Jake and Elwood◊ gazing into each other's eyes. This imitated a number of covers for Casablanca with Rick and Ilsa◊ posed similarly.
• The cover of the Strangers with Candy movie is a sleazy parody of the cover of Mean Girls. Justified, as the movie (and the show it's based on) is a darkly comic parody of teen dramas and after-school specials.
• Hilariously, the newest DVD releases of Near Dark model their covers after the Twilight films. Considering Near Dark features the more archetypal scary, violent, and unsexy vampires, Twifans could be in for quite a show if they picked this one up.
• The thriller Summer's Blood, starring Ashley Greene as a woman being stalked by a family of serial killers, had an alternate poster designed to cash in on the fact that Greene played Alice in Twilight. It even received a Copycat Title in the form of Summer's Moon, done in a very Twilight-inspired font. Compare the original poster◊ to the (pun intended) revamped one.◊ Probably the most interesting part of the change was that the original tagline, "Abducted by a twisted family, will she become one of them to survive?" was cut down to just "Will she become one of them to survive?" Between the removal of the context, the new title, the change of the background from day to night (complete with full moon), the cropping out of the knife the character is holding, and the already-existing blood around her mouth, the new poster seems designed to evoke Twilight, making viewers think that the movie will be about the girl deciding whether to become a vampire as opposed to a serial killer!
• Tyler Perry's films:
  • This poster for I Can Do Bad All by Myself was pretty obviously modeled on the one for Straw Dogs (1971). This was probably an homage that people were meant to notice, though.
  • Likewise, Boo! A Madea Halloween had a whole slew of posters designed to homage classic horror films, such as Halloween,◊ The Exorcist,◊ and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.◊ Again, this was fully intentional.
• Similarly to the above, the B-grade zombie film Zombeavers released a set of posters parodying those for American Hustle, her (2013), and Gravity, all with self-deprecating quotes from critics attached.
• A DVD release of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939) featuring Basil Rathbone features a cover design◊ that is a blatant attempt◊ to cash in on the Robert Downey, Jr. films.
• Similarly, the cover of Young Sherlock Holmes was altered for its re-release to resemble the Robert Downey, Jr. films, from this to this.◊
• The VHS cover for The Eerie Midnight Horror Show is ridiculously similar◊ to The Rocky Horror Picture Show, down to the title (the movie itself is a ripoff of The Exorcist). The Cinema Snob even expressed disgust at seeing that the DVD one◊ is nowhere as Narmy.
• The Marriage Chronicles is obviously meant to be styled after the Love Actually cover.
• Under homages, Mystery Date (1991)'s DVD release got a cover reminiscent of an Alfred Hitchcock thriller such as North By North West.
• One cover for The Roommate is suspiciously similar to that of◊ Panic Room.
• The covers for the 2015 straight-to-video film God of Thunder (a.k.a. Dark Universe). The former poster◊ is a straight ripoff of Thor, while for the latter,◊ just exchange the man and woman on the cover for Channing Tatum and Mila Kunis and it's basically the cover for Jupiter Ascending.
• Deliberately invoked with the poster of American Reunion which mimics the poster of the original American Pie film by placing everybody in their original positions◊ as a nice tribute.
• The cover of a DVD release of the horror movie Housebound, which was originally released with this poster, has a new image that obviously channels The Cabin in the Woods with a similar white background, font, image of a warped house, etc. Also, The poster for the 2015 film Shut In shares many of the same similarities to the Cabin in the Woods poster.
• The film Waste Land has a poster that seems based on that of Sin City, with the same font, font color and similar coloring scheme, and the characters are even posing in a way similar to those of Sin City.
• The original theatrical poster for The Empire Strikes Back posed Han and Leia in a clinch just like the poster for the 1967 theatrical rerelease of Gone with the Wind.
• The 2014 Punjabi film Control Bhaji Control has a poster design◊ that is a pretty blatant ripoff of Horrible Bosses, right down to even featuring "Maneater" and "Psycho" labels.
• Compare and contrast this poster for 2015's Hitman: Agent 47 with this one for 2010's Inception.
• A Futile and Stupid Gesture imitates the layout and typography of the infamous "If You Don't Buy This Magazine, We'll Kill This Dog" National Lampoon cover, with Will Forte standing in for the dog.
• Played for Laughs with one poster◊ for The Hitman's Bodyguard. The poster is an almost-exact recreation of the main poster◊ for The Bodyguard with the bodyguard carrying his ward—except the bodyguard, played by Ryan Reynolds, is carrying Samuel L. Jackson.
• Some of the artwork for the German film The Comedian Harmonists (also known as The Harmonists) prominently features, in addition to or even instead of the sextet whom the movie is actually about, a minor character portrayed as an expy of Liza Minnelli's character Sally Bowles from Cabaret.
• This Japanese cover for a porn movie (the image is SFW) recreates the layout and typography of the poster◊ for Takeshi Kitano's Violent Cop, putting a Girl with Psycho Weapon Flipping the Bird in place of the stone-faced actor and director.
• Ready Player One, as part of its marketing campaign befitting its Reference Overdosed nature, had several different alternate posters paying homage to such popular films as The Goonies, Blade Runner, The Matrix, Bullitt and so on. Just like the movie itself, some loved them and others found them tacky and on-the-nose.
• Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me had a print ad in the later weeks of its theatrical run mimicking the poster art of Big Daddy, with Dr. Evil and Mini-Me peeing against the wall.
• After her high-profile marriage to Prince Harry in 2018, the 2013 Meghan Markle rom-com Random Encounters was re-released in the UK under the slightly edited title A Random Encounter with new cover art◊ clearly designed to mimic La La Land. The only elements the two films have in common are romantic plots and a Los Angeles setting and the original poster was more derivative of a standard rom-com.
• The 2022 horror movie The Ghosts of Monday has a poster with a haunted house on the top half and the lower half of a woman's face below, very clearly imitating the poster for The Haunting of Hill House (2018).

Food

• Nabisco's healthier Snackwells line of products came out with green labeling. Shortly thereafter, other companies started mimicked the packaging for their healthier offerings. Fast forward ten years, and now it's considered the standard identification for a lower fat, lower sugar, lower sodium food alternative.
• The packaging for artificial sweeteners plays follow-the-leader with the first product to reach the market. Saccharine is always in pink packages (like Sweet'n'Low), aspartame is blue (like Equal), and sucralose is yellow (like Splenda).
• There are two kinds of store-brand cereals in the US: those that use similarly themed but distinct mascots, which can taste as good as or even better than the premium brands, like Malt-O-Meal... and those that don't even try to hide what they're copying, and whose taste match those efforts, like Super Value Plus. 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... Of course, the "standard" colour coding could be considered a switch in the first place, because the company that came up with it in the first place (Tayto) uses red for cheese & onion and blue for salt & vinegar.
• The UK supermarket Asda's Puffin chocolate biscuits are their own brand verison of McVities Penguins, and used to come in a very similar wrapper (red, blue writing, picture of a black and white seabird). In 2011, McVities sued and won. They're still called Puffins, but the wrapper design is now completely different.

Literature

• An example that's laced with Hypocritical Humor: Nancy Stouffer, of The Legend of Rah and the Muggles infamy, claimed that the name and likeness of Harry Potter were ripped off from her character "Larry Potter" (whose last name was added later to bolster the evidence for suing J.K. Rowling for plagiarism, as Rowling's lawyers discovered), and re-released the books with the title resident on covers so blatantly ripped off from the Bloomsbury editions of the Harry Potter novels that they have to be seen to be believed.◊
• Pretty much every vampire book published in the last five years has a cover that looks exactly like The Twilight Saga. Even classic romance stories like Romeo and Juliet, Wuthering Heights and Pride and Prejudice have appeared with Twilight-inspired covers at some bookstores. Canadian bookstore chains Indigo, Coles, and Chapters (all owned by Indigo Books & Music Inc.) even displayed the Twilight-ified classics together during the marketing for Breaking Dawn.
• 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 this. The Big Con is also the title of a work attacking conservative economic philosophies, which has used this cover◊ and later this one◊.
• The Quantum Thief, a post-Singularity Space Opera, was first published in England and was given this cover for the United States printing, which is very similar in font and design to the covers for books in the Culture series: compare.
• Thanks to the huge boost in popularity Game of Thrones has given to his writing, George R.R. Martin's humorous science fiction novel Tuf Voyaging was reissued, and one of its covers◊ definitely plays off of the Medieval Fantasy setting of A Song of Ice and Fire.
• The cover of at least one edition of Divergent has a burning brooch (that looks suspiciously like the mockingjay pin from The Hunger Games) set against a dark background. Sure, the series starts with a 16 year old girl facing a traumatically special day in her life, and it's told in first person but... erm... The Hunger Games it ain't.
• The 1985 speculative-future-science book Life Off Earth had nothing to do with the Life series of wildlife documentaries by David Attenborough beyond the similarity of the title to Life On Earth ... and a cover◊ that deliberately mimics the book adaptation◊ of the series, only with the tree frog turned into an alien.
• HarperCollins published a new UK edition of The Thirteen Problems by Agatha Christie in 2021, under the US title of The Tuesday Club Murders, written in a slanted font not entirely dissimilar to the previous year's bestseller The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman. The blurb begins "The ORIGINAL weekday murder club".

Live-Action TV

• Some copies of the History Channel's The 300 Spartans have been modified to look like the cover of 300 soon after the DVD release. The resemblance continues in the documentary itself, sepia-tones and all. Only perhaps more historically accurate.
• The title card for the MTV reality show 16 and Pregnant rips off Juno.
• The poster for Yellowjackets has a near-identical composition to that of the first posters for Euphoria, both showing the left side of a distressed teenage girl's face and being heavily color-saturated, the former with blue and purple colors and the latter with yellow.

Video Games

• The cover art for Billy the Wizard imitates the cover art of the game adaptation of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.
• An awful lot of so-called "1000-in-1" ROM-loading video game systems mimic the look of consoles current at the time.
• Pirates was a PlayStation 2 game released right around the time Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl came out. Interestingly, the official game for the movie apparently began as an unrelated pirate game.
• Pyst and its planned sequel Driven had the excuse of explicitly identifying themselves as parodies, and the developers would probably have won if a lawsuit was filed against them.
• A promotional CGI render Capcom made for Resident Evil 4 shows Ada Wong posing similar to the way Anne Parillaud did for the La Femme Nikita movie poster. Probably more of an homage than anything else, though.
• The cover artwork for the original Metal Gear is a blatant trace-over of a promotional still of Michael Biehn in The Terminator.
• The cover artwork for the NES version of Contra is based on two different promotional stills of Arnold Schwarzenegger from the movie Predator.
• The cover artwork for Double Dragon Advance is based on a promotional still of Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris from Way of the Dragon.
• 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, the game's Indiana Jones-ripoff protagonist stands in for Harrison Ford.
• This article from Hardcore Gaming 101 compiles tons of examples, including a few mentioned above. Video game art directors have rarely seemed to have an issue with plagiarism.
• The cover and title screen of Power Blade show what looks a lot like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
• The box art of Duke Nukem 3D copied Ash's poster pose from Army of Darkness.
• Digimon used to mimic the covers of Pokémon to confuse parents and kids, then they actually became popular.

Theatre

• Forbidden Broadway's "Original Cast Recording" had a cover based on the poster art for Merrily We Roll Along, though parody is clearly the justification here.

Web Original

• The DVD release of the same-titled Web Animation which inspired Undercover Brother mimicked the derivative film's poster.

Western Animation

• Avengers Assemble has a DVD cover◊ that blatantly duplicates the movie poster of The Avengers.

Other

• Any number of Chinese cars; Shuanghuan CEO (BMW X5), Great Wall Florid (Scion xA with Toyota Yaris nose), Huo Yun Electromobile (Smart Fortwo), FAW F5 (Volkswagen Jetta) and so on. This doesn't count licensed clones and rebadged cars (Daewoo Lacetti/Chevrolet Optra, or Pontiac GTO and Vauxhall (Holden) Monaro), which are a different matter entirely and a long tradition in the auto industry.
• A sleazy practice among a number of less-reputable for-profit colleges is to rip off the name of a far more respected school in order to trick incoming students into thinking they're affiliated with them. At least one college recruiting envelope said [In large bold print] "Northwestern College of Law" [in small print] "of Lewis & Clark College." There's also a "Berkeley College" that likes to advertise in the New York Tri-State area. More often than not, any degrees offered by these schools are likely to be A Degree in Useless due to the lack of accreditation. Given that for-profit colleges are a major driving force behind the student loan crisis (a massively disproportionate share of American college students with student loan debt got it by attending a for-profit school), these tactics are especially predatory here.
• Private Eye has a column about examples of this trope with book covers. One of the most popular covers appears to be a man in a dark coat striding dramatically away from the viewer into a winter scene.
• Instant Immersion, a language-learning software that apes Rosetta Stone's yellow packaging. It's significantly cheaper; however, the contents are... considerably cheaper.

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