Unintentional Relevance

Not sure what "thematic resemblance" means. Literary themes involve a persona archetype and a social concern: an individual and nature, and society, and personal life, and alienation, and family, and the gods, and government, and technology, and science, etc., and are overbroad to the point of mere generalizations.

More focused themes entail narrowed contestant persona type, narrowed social concern, and narrowed attitude toward a specific moral human condition. Derivative themes often dilute focus to near nada: nothing significant revealed about the human condition and bland stock stereotype and little, if any, social commentary about a moral concern.

Motion pictures, too, overgeneralize for maximum audience breadth. That's a sound motion picture business model; Hollywood productions are costly; therefore, diluted focus captures wide audiences and enhances revenues.

An added challenge of a written-word narrative, in an age when everything has been done to death for three thousand years, is focused topical and thematic freshness, vibrancy, and vividness. A work that might be an unintended derivative of a current popular culture product might covertly comment about the done to death aspect, a parody subtext, of sorts, of the pop cult product itself and the otherwise difficult to overcome sameness concern of publication cult overall.

The original post title itself goes far into that terrain: "Unintentional Relevance," Or Unintended Revelation, etc., off tangent ricochet of a direct and overt declaration. Plus several covert cues and in-clues here and there within the story that imply that topic is what the story is actually about. For such a story to work, the story would all but require overt resemblance to an extant and current pop culture product. In other words, turns lemons into lemonade.

Those types of added dimensions separate creative writer artists from the mediocrity pall and separate specific yet broad appeals from derivative, diluted, bland works.

Yeah, I just mean my story resembles a setting and a premise of a recent film. I can’t get any more specific because the contest is anonymous.

I think if you’ve got two stories of about the same quality ready for submission, it couldn’t hurt to trunk the similar one and send it out a bit later. At that point you’re just getting rid of a potential concern so why not.

But if it were me and I felt like the similar one were stronger, I’d just send it in and hope for the best. If the movie is just about to release, it’ll be a while before your story gets slushed anyway.

A few years back, I was in a similar situation. I submitted a story with the biblical story of Noah as the major theme (with a sci-fi twist). As soon as I submitted, I heard that a major picture about Noah was coming out. Well, long story short, that movie bombed (I watched it, it was bad) and my story got a HM (my first )

One anecdote does not a trend make, but I say go for it.