Originally published at: Sister Swap are two different Hallmark Christmas movies made from the same footage | Boing Boing
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It’s pretty clear they’re different movies…in one picture one of the sisters is on the left and in the other she’s on the right. Duh!
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Yeah, we had this crazy idea to localize the editing of the footage to appeal more to rural or urban audiences.
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This is incredible. Major props for the idea, you don’t see something like that every day.
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Dan Harmon watches too much TV. That’s my only take away from this.
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They are real life sisters (which is already a surprise to me tbh!), but not twins. You can’t just age Ashley Williams 7 years like that!
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My theory goes like this: Someone looked at the most profitable songs and movies and saw that many of them were about Christmas. They can get rerun endlessly which is great! You pay to make it once, but get royalties every year.
However, it is hard to just “write a beloved Christmas classic” so you have to look at quantity rather than quality.
But why, after making 100+ of generic movies a year, more than any reasonable person could watch, why keep making more? Why not just re-air any of the previous hundreds of interchangeable films?
I presume that ad sales for first-run programming is higher than that of reruns. And they have a guaranteed audience over Christmas, if you can make a “new” film on a fixed, small budget you get guaranteed profit.
The profit motive has gifted us generic, interchangeable, nothing media. Good job capitalism.
My added conspiracy theory is that these scripts are a proving ground for AI content generation.
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In junior high, I met a couple of ‘twins’.
One was the epitome of femininity, the other masculinity incarnate.
Later in life, the latter transitioned, as both were born in female bodies.
How I loathe Hallmark produced movies with a passion; that they are pretty much all ‘cookie cutter’ productions with the same plot comes as no surprise.
Each movie is basically indistinguishable from all the others in the genre.
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Speaking as an identical twin who is also a parent of boy/girl fraternal twins: go ahead and keep using the word. We all know what it means.
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These two are extra not twins, being born 7 years apart.
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They are actors playing twins. I don’t see the big deal, it’s not like Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher were really twins either.
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The copy calls them real-life twins, which they are not. Their characters are twins and these 2 moves are twins, but not the same as the movie “Twins” (1988) with Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was in the “Terminator” (1984) with Linda Hamilton, who has a twin.
3rd base.
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Make sure there’s no text in the frame and mirror image it- easy peasy. 
It’s an interesting experiment for getting two films out of one production set, at least.
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That is true.
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Not a big fan of Hallmark, but this is a cool idea for a narrative scheme. Kind of like if they’d made the movie “He said, she said,” into 2 separate films.
Maybe the saccharin sweet, troped-up version will be a proving ground for more interesting takes.
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