Do you feel escapism is less commonplace in film nowadays.

I feel people are sadly less looking for escapism, though some films can be a mirror image of reality, I wish we still had movies that aren't 100% realistic. What are your thoughts on this?

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My thoughts are: film trends change...during the Depression in the 1930s screwball comedies and escapist feel good films were popular. Today they are still made but not nearly as popular. I'd say with the specter of pandemic hanging over our collective heads the mood has shifted to a more darker, pessimistic world view and current film making will reflect that. But if you want more escapist type films, watch more older movies.

I don't watch many of them, but aren't all of the superhero films of the last ten years mostly escapist (with probably the exception of Dark Knight era Batman). There may be more signifiers of realism in these than, let's say, the Donner Superman films, but they still are creating a world where there are clear delineations between heroes and villains, generally have happy endings and noble attributes are rewarded. Since none of those actually have a good relationship with realism (the line between heroism and villainry can be murky, happy endings should never be counted on and nobility is generally trounced on as opposed to rewarded), I think they qualify pretty strongly as escapism.

And the fact that they are absolutely beasts at the box office indicates this is what people want.

Unfortunately, there does not seem to be any room for my proposed Salo remake in the lives of todays youth.

Sigh

I think there's a TON of fantasy/sci-fi/action these days that falls into that escapist category. I do think it's unfortunate that the Marvel movies take up a lot of that space, but there are still others out there.

Isn’t a movie by definition non-realistic? As compared, say, to a documentary?

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Yeah, I keep hearing people say that they want movies to be realistic.

Given that I watched parts of Captain Marvel, Thor: Ragnarok, and Endgame last night... no.

Now that I'm thinking about it, is there anything BUT escapism in mainstream movies now?
Between Marvel and DC, the Star Wars franchise, the attempts to continue to milk the Harry Potter Universe, the attempts to launch Universal's "Dark Universe" with all the classic monsters, the Jumanji franchise, like 15 years of Transformers movies, the Fast and the Furious franchise... honestly is there anything other than escapism in theaters EVER?

Considering the popularity of Sci-Fi and Fantasy films - especially all the Marvel and DC stuff - I'm going to go with "no."

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If you want escapism, you need to go back to the 90s and 80s, i just rewatched fair game 1995, and i really enjoyed it

Even forum-ing like this is basically just another form of escapism. Even if the context is personal, serious/subject matter, or commercial-based etc - art in nature is a form of expression, and also a distraction.
So regardless of the medium, I don't think it necessarily tied with a certain genre or element of story.

Still, take away my boring pedanticism, like the others have said, idk if someone doesn't call this stuff not a basic shape of cinema escapism.

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Underrated flick.

The thing is , this movie is very entertaining, 90 mins of pure action

Those types of movies are underappreciated, but I love them.

I thought people were looking for too much escapism now, as there seems to be more action and adventure movies now than ever before, and much more comic book movies now than ever before. Unless I am wrong, and there is actually less of it now?

Movies have always mainly been about escape from reality. That's why we go. I don't have any idea what the percentage of movies are that are actually realistic and fact based, but it's low, even among movies that CLAIM to be ripped from the head lines or whatever. The exact form of the escape changes from time to time, we still like movies with characters and plots that have resolution in 2 hours, simple solutions, good looking characters, neat dialog and desirable outcomes. Compared to real life, that's a fantasy.

Well, but obviously that's not always true, whether we're looking at something like There Will Be Blood, or The Proposition, or something as utterly grounded in brutal realism as Claire Denis' White Material, there's a lot of film that isn't escapism but a hard examination of life and what we really are. But I think that right now that's faded a good bit and everyone's escaping to Marvel or The Fast And The Furious or Star Wars or whatever. You get Jumanji making almost a billion dollars. Because, frankly, things are just too ******* dark and depressing in the real world.

I tend toward the idea that there's not just fairy tale escape but also the escape that comes with the idea that things COULD be MUCH worse, a kind of negative escape.

Having watched innumerable horror movies in my life, as well as crime movies, war movies, disaster flicks, etc, I ask myself why. The answer is that, for the moment, sitting in my basement with a beer and chips, while I watch Tokyo being stomped by a giant, fire-breathing reptile, I know that, whatever my current complaints are in real life, they're way less significant than those unfortunate Japanese people being stomped or incinerated by Godzilla.

I don't live in the Wild West, there are no escaped lunatics in my neighborhood as far as I know and the dam a couple blocks from my house probably won't burst today since it's not raining.

All things in life are transient of course, but those movies where people, due to no fault of their own, are being ravaged one way or the other, natural or supernatural, can remind us that things really CAN be worse.

I don't disagree with any of that, that's why I picked movies where virtually nothing that might not happen or have actually happened to everyday people in real life happens. I mean, honestly nothing extraordinary happens in There Will Be Blood. An ******* finds oil. The film follows said ******* for a few years. Occasionally someone says something or there is the rare act of violence. You could maybe argue that the premise of The Proposition is a bit extraordinary but only in the sense that the titular ask is perhaps unique to these peoples' situation. White Material there is nothing out of the ordinary at all it is really just a movie of a very very realistic situation in a very real place. Beautiful film, by the way. Another one that comes to mind is Shame. Not really much escaping going on there.
So I think it would be stretch to call a lot of movies escapism. Rom-coms, sure; Horror movies, absolutely, obviously most Westerns, Sci-Fi/Fantasy for certain, but there's a lot of drama (certainly not all or even most of it, but a lot) that's about as far from escapism as one can get and still call it a movie and it seemed like, for a while, those had actually had some traction. Then the World happened again and everybody went back to pure escapism, as many audiences did with Star Wars in the post-Nixon, post-Vietnman 70s.

I'm not sure why that is, but it's something I've noticed on Reddit a lot. People demand and cheer for R ratings all the time. Hey, wouldn't an R-rated reboot of XYZ be nice? Why the R rating? What would graphic violence and nudity add? Dunno, but we want the R. I personally don't see the appeal and it really killed my interest in modern action movies. It's great that people like John Wick because they can pull into a morgue in a warzone and see that it looks the same, but to me that adds too much weight to these types of movies, so I'm not going to watch them at all.

If I had to guess, I'd say it's because movies, specifically in the US, everything has been censored for so long that anything transgressive is seen as having inherent value. That previously censored content may not add anything to the stories, but people want it everywhere.