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Q: I just saw the movie "Definitely, Maybe," and it's awfully similar to "How I Met Your Mother." Was the show based on the movie?

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Author: 
Adam Thomlison / TV Media

Definitely not.

There is indeed a long history of TV shows based on movies, but in this case, much like the various romances in the film, the timing just doesn't work out. "Definitely, Maybe" was released in 2008, three years after "How I Met Your Mother" debuted on CBS.

That, of course, leaves open the possibility that the movie was based on the show. However writer-director Adam Brooks certainly doesn't give credit that way, and the show was a relatively big deal on TV by that point (its first season made Time magazine's year-end best-of-TV list in 2005).

The similarities, however, are impossible to deny. The basic premise of both is a guy explaining to his child/children ... well, how he met her/their mother. Then, the majority of the story is told through flashbacks of the dad's romantic misadventures along the way.

You aren't the first person to notice the kinship, though. Cinemablend reviewer Josh Tyler called the film, "basically the entire run of ["How I Met Your Mother"] condensed down into a single movie, except minus Barney and that annoying laugh track." Phil Villarreal of the Arizona Daily Star was even less generous, calling the film's concept "close to a wholesale ripoff."

But in an interview with Cinema.com, Brooks said, rather, that "Definitely, Maybe" was "a personal story that I wanted to tell" (he didn't elaborate on what made it personal).

Star Ryan Reynolds ("Deadpool," 2016) suggested the storytelling frame isn't even the key element of the movie. In an interview with RottenTomatoes.com, he said instead that "Definitely, Maybe" is really a "love letter to broken homes," and that Brooks "wanted to write the 'anti-romantic comedy' in a sense." (The film begins, and ends, with him and the mother getting divorced.)

 

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