One would still have to obtain story rights and pursue other related legal issues when dealing with real living people and (in this instance) the deaths of their friends and family.

That said, the filmmakers behind the narrative film directed by McG would have done that. They may have also done additional research on their own.

Did the doc filmmakers meet with McG and the Marshall prod’s? It’s possible. But you can’t “rip off” a documentary.

They are not anything alike aside from the source material (which neither of them own) being the same.

This would be like assuming every story about a presidential race is a ripoff. Or every story about 9-11. It happened in the public eye. It was news. It is fair game to make a movie out of it.

But it is possible. Just very unlikely. They’d have to be similar in tone, have similar phrases and writing, and similar shot composition, etc.

It would have to be much more than just being about the same thing.

I used to play the Champions RPG back in higschool and one of my friends made up a character that could shapeshift into anything he came into physical contact with. He could also shape his limbs into weapons (spikes, hooks, hammers etc) and he could recover from physical damage by reshaping.

His natural “unshifted” form was that of a featureless humanoid made of mercury. Sound familiar?

5 years later Terminator 2 comes out and we all saw Domino (the character’s name) as the new Terminator model.

It happens.

OK, here’s a little story. Many years ago I worked for this 3D animation studio. I come up with an idea for a cartoon series called Space Monkey, later changed to A.P.E since there was already a character called Space Monkey I later found out. Anyway. The story went like this. A monkey called Ham is shot in to space to investigate a phenomena near earth. When he gets up there a worm hole opens up and he’s sucked in to it and crash lands on a planet where he has to help out its inhabitants fight against a ruthless tyrant. That was the basic story, it also involved a russian dog and a lounge singing platypus. I made a trailer for it and the company promoted it abroad with other production companies. Fast forward a few years later and I’m watching the trailer for Space Chimps, something looked familiar in it and when I read the synopses I thought “Wait a minute. Haven’t I seen this before”.
Space Chimps revolves around a group of monkeys, the leader is called Ham III, who are shot in to space to investigate a strange phenomena only to be sucked through a wormhole and crash land on a planet where they have to help its inhabitants fight off an evil tyrant.
And to top it all off one of the guys who worked at my company back in the day works for Fox who distribute the film.
Coinkidink?