LOS ANGELES - When veteran filmmaker Roland Emmerich was first offered the chance to direct a movie about terrorists taking over the White House, he couldn't believe his luck.

"It's such a good idea," Emmerich, the money-minting director of movies such as "2012," said last week at a Culver City editing facility, where he has been holed up polishing his new film, "White House Down." "I was surprised no one had done it before."

It turns out someone has. Just before.

Emmerich's movie, about a wannabe Secret Service agent with a Messiah complex who serendipitously ends up at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. during a fiery terrorist attack, will come out June 28. That's barely three months after the release Friday of Antoine Fuqua's "Olympus Has Fallen" - about a wannabe Secret Service agent with a Messiah complex who serendipitously ends up at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. during a fiery terrorist attack.

"Olympus" and "White House" provide the latest and in some ways strangest example of what happens when a pair of film-industry heavyweights decide to stubbornly stay the course. They also demonstrate how, more than a decade after 9/11, Hollywood is eager to get back to doing what it does best - taking famous landmarks and blowing them to smithereens.

The question is: How much of that destruction will Americans want to see?

The film business likes to avoid movies with similar premises. History shows they can be disastrous.

In 2004, Oliver Stone's "Alexander" bombed six months after "Troy," another ancient epic. In 2006 the Truman Capote biopic "Infamous" failed to gain any traction after the success the previous year of "Capote." Last spring, "Mirror Mirror," the first of competing two Snow White movies, sputtered as audiences waited to see the second movie, the darker-toned "Snow White and the Huntsman," two months later.

The White House films have even more in common than many of these movies. Perhaps not since the natural-disaster pictures "Armageddon" and "Deep Impact" 15 years ago - Hollywood's quintessential case of accidental twins - have a pair of movies so close in tone, plot and symbolism hit theaters in such quick succession.

While both "Armageddon" and "Deep Impact" were successful, they were released in an era before realms such as cable drama and Internet video had come into their own. Those movies also didn't share an iconic building as a key selling point.

"If all they have in common is a generic concept, two movies in the same season can work. But if they're similar in their specifics, it could be a problem, especially for the second film," said Bruce Nash, a film-industry expert who runs the box office website the Numbers. "The White House movies would seem to be much closer to that second category."

How did it happen? Basically because of a high-stakes game of Hollywood chicken.

It began last April, when Sony bought the "White House Down" script and hired Emmerich to direct, setting up a battle with the existing "Olympus" project, which was financed by Millennium Entertainment and had already retained Gerard Butler as the agent.

Millennium responded by hiring director Fuqua, best known for "Training Day," and moving up the production, which would also star Aaron Eckhart as the president, from September to July. It felt secure in its position, according to a person involved in the film who wasn't authorized to talk about it publicly, because "White House" had no cast yet, and big studio projects with no cast can languish for years.