What's it like?

As writers/artist/creators of media, we dig for new material. Or we're supposed to, right? Wouldn't we all like to think of that super cool, completely unheard of, 100% original story that audiences everywhere will love for being different? More often than not, I (and I'm sure many others) have to settle for an original re-telling of an old story. It happens. In fact, after millennia of storytelling, it's pretty damn inevitable.

But I don't go into a project asking, "What existing work can I rewrite for my own purposes?" I like to think that the screenplays into which I've poured hundreds of hours are different--maybe not good, but different. The last thing I want someone to ask is that of "what it's like," but the question has come up in every pitch I've ever witnessed. If I thought that my script was as simple as The Matrix meets Ground Hog Day (I'm looking at you, Source Code), I wouldn't have written past the first act. Do people have something against ideas that aren't really "like" anything that's been recognizably done before? I understand the principle of comfort in familiarity, but if all people accept are stories that boil down to x (Oscar) + y (blockbuster), won't we end up with a giant, box office slush pile of things we've already seen? Oh, wait...