Rethinking Escapism: Narrative Distance, Semantic Proximity, and Film Market Performance

Do macroeconomic conditions shape the market performance of distinct narrative features? Existing accounts often evaluate cultural consumption along a single continuum from realism to escapism. This paper proposes that narrative content operates through multiple, quantifiable dimensions: structural displacement from ordinary settings and semantic distance from contemporaneous public discourse. Using a film-country panel covering 11,558 films across 92 country markets from 2000 to 2024, the analysis combines international box office outcomes with text-based measures derived from plot summaries and a large-scale news corpus. Linear mixed-effects estimates show that structurally distant narratives carry a positive average market premium, and that this premium is compressed during stronger-growth periods. Regime estimates indicate that the premium is similar in low- and middle-growth environments and smaller in high-growth environments. This macroeconomic sensitivity is concentrated most clearly in temporal forms of narrative distance. Semantic distance exhibits the opposite pattern: conditional on narrative distance, films farther from public discourse perform worse, and this penalty is smaller in stronger-growth environments. These opposing gradients indicate that weaker economic conditions are not associated with a general premium for detachment from reality; films perform relatively better outside strong-growth environments when they combine structural distance from ordinary settings with thematic proximity to public concerns. By moving beyond a binary conceptualization of realism versus escape, the paper provides a multidimensional framework for analyzing how economic conditions are associated with the relative market performance of cultural narratives across countries. These findings are difficult to reconcile with purely avoidance-oriented accounts of cultural consumption under stress, suggesting instead that mediated engagement with the present is associated with stronger relative performance than full withdrawal from it.