How a New Era of Escapism Entertainment is Unfolding

Jobu Topaki experiences every world and every possibility at the same time. Untethered and beholden of infinite knowledge of infinite universes, her fractured mind has seen and felt too much. She merely wishes to “finally escape.” So, one day, Topaki got bored and put everything on a bagel—everything: all of her hopes and dreams and more. Spinning at a million miles an hour, the omniscient dark swirling mass of dough sucks everything in embodying her philosophy—or in her mind, the truth: if everything is possible, nothing matters. Creating the bagel is Topaki’s escape. She explains to her mother, Evelyn, why she actually built the bagel, “It wasn’t to destroy everything. It was to destroy myself.”?

In the record-breaking, genre-shattering 2022 film, Everything Everywhere All At Once, the Topaki character is the main antagonist and alpha counterpart to Joy, the daughter of Evelyn. And The Everything Bagel symbolizes the expanding escapism entertainment era happening now.?

Escapism is how people cope with the pendulum of pain and boredom in their daily existence. For Topaki, putting everything on a bagel is how she rids herself of guilt, having seemingly made nothing of her life. It’s as if the creators of the movie, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, an American filmmaking duo otherwise known as “The Daniels,” sprinkled nihilism, absurdism, and existentialism into the script like sesame, poppy seeds, and salt. In one scene where mother and daughter sit as rocks in an alternate universe, dull, immobile, and overlooking a vast canyon below, Topaki / Joy further broadens her point, “Every new discovery is just a reminder — we’re all small and stupid.”?

The pandemic, a period imbued with bouts of acute boredom and incessant aches of uncertainty, led many to seek escape from the torrential downpour of unprecedented events through diversion—specifically via movies and TV. Coming out the other side is the beginning of a new cycle in entertainment. Granted, it’s one many are still figuring out. In the aftermath of living through this global event, audiences are witnessing the transformation of genres, a nostalgia craving like never before, and stories inviting viewers to express suppressed emotions vicariously.

Escapism can alter and even create new genres in film and TV. The now most awarded film of all time, Everything Everywhere All At Once, is a kaleidoscope of genres—a tapestry of cinematic influences seamlessly combining elements of kung fu, sci-fi, romance, and comedy. One film critic described it as an “exuberant swirl of genre anarchy.” Led by editor Paul Rogers, a small crew of a half dozen video editors takes audiences on a quantum physics-defying journey through the multiverse where Evelyn Quan Wang, a Chinese-American immigrant played by Michelle Yeoh, must harness her newfound powers to prevent Jobu Topaki, played by Stephanie Hsu, from destroying the multiverse—with a bagel. The genre-transcending absurdist comedy was A24’s highest-grossing film ever, with over $100 million in box office earnings—and accompanying post-pandemic research provides insights into why the film hit big when it did.?

A dilated genre palate shined a light on pandemic-related content. And while some studios ignored it, others embraced it—especially one pandemic-like show which captivated audiences more than others: The Last of Us. Others, like Netflix’s Beef, hold up a mirror to audiences reflecting how despair can begin to permeate beneath swelling anger. “There are very, very few people nowadays who have genuine faith in our institutions or even in progress as a concept,” says Greg Sharzer, author of Late Escapism and Contemporary Neoliberalism: Alienation, Work and Utopia. “Together with this sense of absolute despair, there is this ultimate, absolute sense of powerlessness. People are fully aware that everything's bad. But they also feel completely helpless to do anything. I think we're left with anger and powerlessness and that leads to certain absurdism and nihilism.”?

Collectively stuck inside and glued to our screens, audiences’ stomachs grumbled for novelty by dabbling with newer formats, platforms, perspectives, and genres. As a result, one-third of consumers believed the pandemic would forever change our entertainment habits, noting how our willingness to experiment has reached a point of no return. Roughly 84% of people reported spending more time watching movies and TV shows during the pandemic than before, as well as experimenting with new genres and distribution platforms, according to a study conducted by United Talent Agency. Plus, 67% of people also intended to spend even more time consuming entertainment in a post-pandemic world—bringing their binge-watching tendencies with them going forward. Time Magazine even calls this post-COVID era “The Hollywood Escape Economy.”?

Escapism is how many have dealt with hardship for ages. Nearly a quarter century ago, Alan Brinkley, an American political historian, wrote in his book Culture and Politics in the Great Depression that reading the magazine, listening to the radio, and watching movies were all attempts to escape the psychological turmoil associated with the disastrous Wall Street Crash of 1929. While magazine readers and radio listeners have been trending down since then, fast forward a century to the present day, and you’ll find movies and TV series are providing 21st-century audiences a chance to “get away from it all”—more specifically, an opportunity to escape the existential angst related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Escapism isn’t new, but this new post-pandemic era of escapism entertainment is slowly catalyzing a new identity.?

What’s unique about the popularity of The Last of Us—whose cumulative audience was the biggest for any HBO series since the final season of Game of Thrones—is that it stretches the former idea of escapism entertainment to new limits. Instead of fleeing from the existential burden of the pandemic by seeking mindless content devoid of the current reality, audiences did the opposite: they escaped to it. Hollywood’s current heartthrob Pedro Pascal, plays Joel, a smuggler tasked with escorting a teenage girl, Ellie, starring Bella Ramsey, across a post-apocalyptic United States—a world overtaken by humans who have fallen prey to the Cordyceps fungus brain infection. As the two traverse the country, Joel adopts a father-figure role in Ellie’s life resulting in the show being referred to as a Parable for Pandemic Parents.

Unsurprisingly, research shows that parents with children under 18 mental health suffered greatly during the pandemic. Parents’ sleeping patterns were thrown off, stress levels soared, and three out of four parents said they could have used more emotional support than they received since the pandemic started, according to an APA study. “Escapism is a feature of everyday life, and everyone is an escapist,” says John Limon, an English professor at Williams College and author of Escape, Escapism, Escapology: American Novels of the Early Twenty-First Century. “In short: escapism is changing the scale of attention away from what you can’t bear to face.”?

It’s not a stretch then to see how a show like The Last of Us, which depicts a father figure obligated to do his best taking care of a young teenager amid a deadly pandemic, is a form of catharsis for numerous parents who attempt to do their best too. They’re seeing themselves in Joel, who can’t solve the problem of a fungus-fueled zombie virus that has swept the nation. But he can work on something smaller, which is focusing his scale of attention on the well-being of a single child in need of him.?

Horror movies also spiked in popularity during and post-pandemic, testing audiences’ increasing tolerance for “viagraphy” (a depiction of violence in ancient Greek and a neologism that Rafa Euba, a retired psychiatrist and author based in London, has thought about inventing). “The only other most reliable thing aside from superhero movies at the movies right now is a horror movie,” The Ringer’s Sean Fennessey said on the podcast The Big Picture in 2022. One study even confirmed that horror fans (especially zombie or alien invasions) and morbidly curious individuals were more psychologically resilient during the COVID-19 pandemic, reporting fewer symptoms of depression, anxiety, irritability, and sleeplessness.??

From the beginning of the pandemic to now, the highest-grossing horror movies include stand-alone scares like Jordan Peele’s American Western slash alien sci-fi spectacle, Nope (2022); the downright disturbing and supernatural, Smile (2022); and a more recent example with 2023’s M3gan (2023), the tale of an artificially intelligent, Chuckie-like doll hellbent on terrorizing others. Additionally, sequels like A Quiet Place: Part II (2021), historical and nostalgic franchises like Scream (2022) and Halloween (2021/2022), plus older, pandemic-related films such as Outbreak (1995) and especially Contagion (2011), a story about a deadly virus that originates in Hong Kong and travels across the globe to the United States, which became one of the most watched movies of the pandemic, all attracted millions of viewers quailing audience’s worries regarding real-world events.

That’s all without mentioning one of the darker and more violent TV series to take the world by storm during the pandemic: Squid Game. The South Korean survival drama series that took director Hwang Dong-hyuk over a decade to make became an immediate global sensation. Netflix paid what now seems a small sum of 21.4 million USD for the dystopian thriller, which would become the platform's most-watched show of all time, bringing in over 1.65 billion hours viewed in the first month. Apparently, a towering, animatronic doll with built-in motion detectors that sings “Red Light Green Light'' in Korean before swiveling its head around 180 degrees and ordering the kill shot on adults dressed in green tracksuits running for their lives was—exactly—what audiences were craving.

“Mainstream entertainment seems to include an ever-increasing proportion of extreme violence,” says Euba. He doubts whether this can be attributed to the pandemic specifically. Nevertheless, he says, “Violence has, of course, always been present in entertainment, and for complex cultural reasons, our tolerance to it is higher than to explicitly sex. However, graphic, prolonged, and sadistic violence now turns up in standard Netflix movies and other outlets with frightening assiduity and very inadequate warnings.”?

That said, violence on screen is by no means limited to the supernatural realm; at the very least, violent thoughts often occur in the natural world and escapism entertainment via film and TV is an effective substitute for experiencing them vicariously—consider Netflix’s new dark comedy series, Beef, starring Ali Wong and Steven Yeun.?

In the opening sequence of Beef, Danny Cho, a contractor played by Steven Yeun, is sitting in his car furious after being unable to return his Forster’s grill at the store because he forgot his receipt—there’s always something. He then finally puts on his seatbelt—after annoyingly getting stuck for a moment—and begins to back out of his parking spot only to be greeted by a white Mercedes SUV abruptly stopping right behind him and blaring its car horn for a ridiculous 10-second span before pulling forward to the entrance of the lot where Amy Lau, played by Wong, finally sticks out her hand and gives him the middle finger. This moment triggers Cho and immediately leads to him chasing down Lau running red lights and gaining ground right before Lau starts throwing trash behind her, eventually splattering a drink across Cho’s windshield.?

The scene ends with both of them willing to jump the curb and almost hit the other’s car before Lau drives off and audiences are left watching Cho recite back to himself her license plate number over and over. Although he doesn’t see who did this initially, he uses the number to track down the driver’s address and then actually goes to it with a gun intending to wreak havoc. He ends up pissing all over the carpet in the house before running down the street, getting his car, and driving off, except at the end of the episode, it’s him now holding up the middle finger and her reciting back to herself his license plate number again and again.

Now, few people would actually do this. But, I believe one of the reasons the show “works” and why audiences enjoy it now is that many viewers can see themselves in this type of situation and can empathize with the idea that small things built up over time can push anyone to the edge. By giving audiences characters exhibiting emotions that viewers also feel from time to time (frustration, rage, even moments surpassing a tipping point), the show becomes something we can escape to simply because we see ourselves in it.?

“My hope is that the post-COVID world will gain perspective,” says Joshua Wilder, a former cognitive behavioral therapist and contributor to Psychology Today, “we have now identified who we need for society to function, and we need to show them more gratitude. I hope that new avenues of exploration will lead to more entertainment that everyday people can see themselves in. The best of us are the rest of us, and entertainment will be a healthier form of escapism when everyone can see themselves in it.”

Beyond genre transformation slash creation, a certain mood within entertainment prevailed during the pandemic: nostalgia. Whether it’s the belief in declinism or rose-colored retrospection, nostalgia, the sentimental longing to relive the past, remains dominant even in the post-pandemic entertainment era. Consequently, nostalgic fervor has seeped into film and TV series. Research shows that media-induced nostalgia can function as a resource to cope with social stress—like fear of isolation—for people who have experienced lockdown measures. In other words, nostalgia and escapism are one and the same.

Our nostalgic media cravings have manifested in a few ways, such as reruns, remakes, and the proliferation of long-tail, generational-bridging series. Bringing in tens of millions of views in 2020 alone, reruns of The Office’s star couple Jim and Pam playing pranks on Dwight, Creed-like shenanigans, and Michael Scott one-liners provided comic relief and created a community amongst people separated. The top three shows, however, that experienced a massive resurgence in 2020 were Friends, The Andy Griffith Show, and Roseanne, which combined for 175 billion minutes. Number four was Family Matters which had a +392% viewership compared to 2019. Nostalgic shows, however, weren’t restricted to a single platform. Not only was reliving the “good old days” through nostalgia comedy programs in demand, but audiences also sought out content through multiple streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Disney+, as well as newer platforms like Peacock, which blossomed in the first quarter of 2021 after adding shows WWE and The Office.????????????????????????????????

Disney was a huge driver of an adjacent form of nostalgic movies: remakes. Walt Disney Pictures consistently released remade all-time classics from its “Renaissance Era” during and after the pandemic. Mulan in 2020. Cruella in 2021. Pinocchio in 2022. Peter Pan and The Little Mermaid in 2023. Snow White, Mufasa: The Lion King, and possibly Lilo and Stitch are set for 2024. “Movies could be 90+ minutes of peace at home,” says Wilder.?

Wilder’s clinical experience with escapism involved primarily working with young men (ages 14-22) with severe behavioral tendencies and participating in a school-based hospitalization program. Although his work was mainly related to video games, he says there were some common themes regarding film and television. “Marvel movies, in particular, were quite popular,” says Wilder. “I do believe that they emotionally connected with the movies. Their worlds had fallen apart, and while they made many poor decisions, they were trying to be better and they did have people that they cared about. People who they felt some responsibility for. It does not surprise me that they were drawn to movies where flawed heroes are trying to save people from catastrophes. I do believe that the movies made them feel better.”

Marvel also represents another theme embedded in the current escapism entertainment economy, which is lengthy movie franchises that intertwine multi-generational audiences—and also seem to never end. Outside of Marvel, who by the end of 2023 will have released ten films since 2021, a few other examples of series that interwove a large demographic of people during the pandemic include the “Bad Boy” trilogy (1995-2020) with Bad Boys For Life featuring Martin Lawrence and Will Smith, the “Ghostbuster” series, (1984-2021) with Ghostbusters: Afterlife featuring many characters from the original blockbuster, and also the “Bond” saga (1962-2021) with No Time to Die featuring Daniel Craig in his fifth and final portrayal of the one and only James Bond. This array of series attracting audiences across generations has only continued in a post-pandemic world too. Jurassic World. Batman. Minions. Fast and Furious. Avatar. The list goes on and on, demonstrating how powerfully long-tailed series and long-awaited sequels provide audiences reprieve from external events and a connection to others. If there was one movie that symbolizes this sort of escape of reliving the past, it’s Top Gun: Maverick.

The smash hit sequel to the 1986 action film—which starred the real-life action hero Tom Cruise—received six Academy Awards nominations and won one for Best Sound. Perhaps this was largely thanks to the opening sequence where test pilot Maverick hits Mach 10 in an experimental plane. YouTube creator Evan Puscha, aka Nerdwriter1, and author of Escape into Meaning: Essays on Superman, Public Benches, and Other Obsessions, said in one of his videos the scene was designed like a perfect pop song. Also, at the most recent Oscars receiving various nominations in his most recent film, The Fabelman, was the all-time great Steven Speilberg. In a warm embrace captured on film between the action star and the filmmaker, Speilberg said to Cruise, “You saved Hollywood’s ass and you might have saved theatrical distribution.” Cruise had turned down streaming rights offers insisting the film be released exclusively in theaters offering audiences the opportunity to finally escape to their local cinemas.?

While nostalgia may currently be the presiding feeling within TV and film, this new evolving era of escapism entertainment also serves as a release valve for a range of emotions. More genres are yet to be created, destroyed, or otherwise defied and transcended. Reruns, remakes, sequels, and series will continue to unite audiences from all generations at home and in theaters. And who knows how massive audiences’ tolerance for rage, violence, horror, and worldwide hysteria will expand??

All that said, Topaki’s premise in Everything Everywhere All At Once—“If everything is possible, then nothing matters”—isn’t the end of the story; there’s more to it. As fellow existentialist Rick Sanchez from the sci-fi animation series Rick and Morty says, “When you know nothing matters, the universe is yours.” That might be the better philosophy to escape reality these days. Either way, we’re all small and stupid.