Every screenwriter has had the 3am version of this thought: someone has already made this. Usually it arrives right after the idea starts working, and it is specific enough to be frightening and vague enough to be unanswerable.
The instinct is to go looking for reassurance, find a film that is roughly similar, and either abandon the idea or convince yourself the resemblance does not count. Both responses come from treating originality as a yes or no property. It is not one.
What a comparable title actually is
In the industry, comps are not an accusation. They are a shorthand for positioning: what audience, what budget, what shelf. When a producer asks what your film is like, they are not asking whether you copied something. They are asking a practical question about who would watch it and what it costs.
Writers hear an aesthetic question. Producers are asking a commercial one. A lot of unnecessary anxiety lives in that gap.
Overlap is not theft, and it is not a coincidence either
Two films can share a premise and be nothing alike. A hostage negotiation in one room is a genre, not a plot. What makes a script distinct is almost never the logline. It is the specific texture of what the characters want, what they are willing to do, and what the film thinks about them.
This is why "has this been done?" produces such useless answers. Everything has been done at the level of premise. Nothing has been done at the level of the particular scene you are about to write.
The useful version of the question is narrower:
- What is the closest thing to this, and in what specific respect is it close?
- Does that film already say what I am trying to say, or does it say something different with similar furniture?
- If a reader knows that film, what will they expect from mine, and do I want to meet that expectation or break it deliberately?
That last one is the real value. Knowing your neighbours tells you which audience expectations are already loaded before your first page.
Why this is hard to do alone
Finding genuine comps requires having seen an enormous amount, across territories, including films that did not travel. Most writers have deep knowledge of a fairly narrow band: their own tradition, plus whatever was exported widely enough to reach them.
That is why comp research done from memory tends to return the same handful of canonical titles, and why it so often misses the film from another industry that is doing almost exactly what you are attempting, quite well, and would have been worth knowing about at the outline stage rather than after the third draft.
What it is not for
A comps list is not a verdict on whether your idea is worth writing. It cannot be. It is a map of the neighbourhood you are building in, and the only sane use of it is to write with your eyes open rather than closed.
If a comp genuinely tells you the story has already been told the way you meant to tell it, that is worth knowing early and cheaply. Far more often it tells you something more useful: that the ground is familiar and the thing you are actually doing with it is not.
That is what Know your turf is for. It reads your logline against a wide catalogue, global and Indian, and gives you the titles that share ground, with the reason each one is close. Not a score, and not a judgment. The neighbourhood you are writing in, so you can decide what to do about it.