"Reality is often disappointing. That is, it was. Now... reality can be whatever I want."
—Thanos, Avengers: Infinity War
Reality Warper in Films and Animated Films.
Animated
- Aladdin:
- The Genie possesses PHENOMENAL COSMIC POWERS! Itty bitty living space that are certainly far beyond that of any human sorcerer, but he does explicitly state three limitations to them. He cannot kill (directly), make someone fall in love, or bring the dead back to life. It's not quite clear if these are simply beyond the Genie's powers or if they are within his capability but are the only wishes he can refuse to grant; when telling Aladdin about these limitations he says that bringing the dead back to life "is not a pretty picture, I don't like doing it!", which suggests the latter. (The scene where he rescues Aladdin from drowning, but has to count it as a wish because of something he said earlier about "no more freebies", also suggests that he sometimes operates under self-imposed limitations, versus actual rules.) The killing thing seems to be a direct impossibility, but as Genie!Jafar states in Aladdin: The Return of Jafar, "You'd be surprised what you can live through." He also seems to be unable to make people fall in love. He was completely surprised when it appeared that he had granted Jafar's wish to make Jasmine love him. Once freed he is just a sorcerer who has the ability to break the fourth wall. However, he has shown the ability to predict the future and "read" reality like a book. He has the ability to read the script of the current episode as well as the ability to consult "the big book of things we're not supposed to know" in order to find out where people are and what they are doing.
- Jafar himself becomes a lower-level Reality Warper after he makes a wish to literally become the most powerful sorcerer on Earth. He demonstrates his new powers with a whole bunch of transmutation and transformation of himself and things around him, especially during his fight with Aladdin. And of course, after wishing to become the most powerful genie in existence, he is nigh-omnipotent with powers surpassing even Genie's, best shown in Jafar's Villain Song in the sequel where he plays Genie like a fiddle.
- Incredibles 2: For a very brief instance, Jack-Jack appears to bend space within the Incredibile after the kids flee from the hypnotized Supers. This ability stretches the boundaries of Jack-Jack's "molecular self-manipulation" powers and is likely an Artistic License taken to serve the narrative via Rule of Cool.
- Midnight Sparkle from My Little Pony: Equestria Girls – Friendship Games becomes this as a result of absorbing the magic of the dimensional portal between the human world and Equestria. Unlike the example of Discord below, the movie does not make light of these powers at all. The fact that she's tearing portals into reality willy-nilly to reach Equestria is bad enough, but she doesn't even care that her powers are literally destroying the fabric of reality to do so as long as she can understand the magic behind it.
Live-Action
- The protagonist of the film Absolutely Anything is given these powers by Sufficiently Advanced Aliens. As the title suggests, he can make anything happen simply by saying what he wants. In an unusual twist, his powers are a Literal Genie: when he makes his dog able to talk, it doesn't make the dog any smarter, forcing him to then make the dog a rational thinking creature.
- The Adjusters in The Adjustment Bureau are able to make minor changes to the environment as long as they are in range.
- Bruce Almighty is about a normal down-on-his-luck guy who thinks he can do a better job than God. So God gives him the opportunity to see if he can do exactly that.
- The warlocks in The Covenant don't seem to read comic books. Their hereditary magic power that they have no real name for is exactly this.
- Daredreamer has a moment where, inside a shared dreamspace, Winston and Jennie force a character to flip back and forth between their preferred versions of him.
- The mysterious Strangers in Dark City (1998) use this to Mind Screw their captive humans. Technically, they're high-powered telekinetics who can warp matter into new shapes; individuals can only use it to levitate across the city and occasionally conjure doors out of solid walls (though their leader, Mr. Book, is vastly more powerful); as such, the Strangers perform their best work in perfect unison, combining their powers and amplifying it through machines to reshape the City. The hero Murdock finds he has this ability as well — and is so powerful that he can create entire landscapes at will once he learns how to control his abilities.
- The character Jobu Tupaki has this ability in Everything Everywhere All at Once. Not only can she manipulate reality around her, she can also instantaneously transport her consciousness into alternate realities.
- Funny Man: The Funny Man can apparently do just about anything he wants to the environment if it serves his trickster schemes.
- Sutter Cane from In the Mouth of Madness appears to gain this ability once he finishes his reality-warping novel. For example, he briefly makes the entire world turn blue, temporarily removes a padded cell from time, and rips his face open like paper to reveal a portal to another world. And naturally, he declares himself a god. According to Word of God, Cane is an ordinary author in reality, having the same godlike power as any other writer does over their fiction... and it just so happens that the film's story is taking place in his newest book.
- This is the entire point behind the architects in Inception. Their job is to craft dreamworlds that the rest of the teams move through, while at the same time creating mazes to trap and confuse the subconscious projections of the dreamers' minds so as to keep them from attacking. Being architects, however, they can also alter the dreamworld's properties to further confuse and fight the projections, but the more they shift and alter reality, the faster the projections converge, the more violent their responses, and the more heavily they are armed.
- Jareth the Goblin King in Labyrinth — he can cause the Mobile Maze he rules over to spring traps on the heroine and her friends at just the right moments, conjure things from thin air, and manipulate time. In fact, the climax has him tempting her to give up her quest with the promise that he can give her anything she wants. But while he has powers over time and space, she realizes that he doesn't have any power over her and stating this is enough to defeat him.
- In both the 1980 and 2002 movies, “Lathe of Heaven”, the protagonist doesn’t know he is a reality warper for most of the storyline. His doctor does know and manipulates his patient in such a way to benefit himself. This is the doctors undoing because the patient begins to wise up throughout the storyline. Then in the end, does use his own reality warping power to defeat his doctor.
- The eponymous The Lawnmower Man. The tag line says it all:God made him simple. Science made him a god.
- George McWhirter Fotheringay, the title character in The Man Who Could Work Miracles does exactly what it says he does. He discovers that he possesses virtually unlimited magic power, but has no understanding of how it works.
- Marvel Cinematic Universe:
- Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame: Whoever possesses all 6 Infinity Stones and is able to withstand their lethal energy long enough to use them can pretty much do with the universe whatever they wish (with maybe 1 or 2 limitations). Thanos' whole quest was to collect them to be able to extinguish half of all life in the universe at the snap of his fingers, and once he succeeds, Bruce Banner uses them to resurrect everyone Thanos snapped away, and then Tony Stark uses them to kill an alternate Thanos and his army.
- Doctor Strange (2016): In the Mirror Dimension, sorcerers who tap into energies of the Dark Dimension can twist reality into impossible shapes, capturing and crushing people within the shifting kaleidoscopic motion, or creating hallways with expanding depth to prevent escape. Kaecilius can do it in the real world too, where thanks to his knowledge of time, he can resist and pull himself out of the Eye of Agamotto's time reversal magic, which is powered by the Time Stone.
- Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2: Ego the Living Planet can manipulate matter on a molecular level through sheer will. However he can only change the physical environment around him.
- Wanda Maximoff is capable of rewriting reality, such as hijacking a town and turning it into a real-life sitcom, creating vibranium out of nothing, and doing so completely subconsciously. It turns out she's always had a probability alteration ability that acts unconsciously. Agatha Harkness outright states that her power is mythic.
- The Ennead in Moon Knight are an entire council of Egyptian gods with reality-changing powers. Khonshu is able to cause wind storms and make lights go ballistic by merely existing, and could casually create a solar eclipse and, with some effort and assistance, rewind the entire night sky to make it appear as it did 2,000 years ago. However, they have a strict Alien Non-Interference Clause — they're supposed to only act in a limited manner and only through their chosen mortal avatars. Khonshu is considered an outcast for his showiness and is eventually Taken for Granite by the others as a punishment.
- The titular terror from Monster! (1999) has the power to force reality to abide by the rules of B Movies during its triannual rampages, which includes clouding the minds of the locals with Arbitrary Skepticism so they will stubbornly cling to the "logical" explanation for any mysterious deaths, severing communications with the outside world, and making the police refuse to react to what it's doing. Only the Town Hero, Lloyd, or his descendants are immune to this mental whammy. One of the more chilling subaspects of it is that anyone who dies during the Monster's rampages is completely forgotten by all the survivors.
- Freddy Krueger in the A Nightmare on Elm Street series of films possesses this power. His control over dreams has basically no limit, so depending on the situation he could morph into anything, produce new abilities from nowhere, or change the whole environment at will. Initially, he can only warp reality in the dream world, but as the series continues and his powers continue to grow, they begin to extend more and more into reality as well.
- 976-EVIL: Hoax's demonic powers eventually include the ability to warp the environment, as he turns his own house into an arctic wasteland and opens a portal to Hell in the yard.
- Nothing: Played with. The two protagonists eventually realize that they can change the featureless environment with their own thoughts, but they can only will things out of existence, they can't create anything new.
- The Beast in the Poltergeist movies (a composite spiritual entity created by, and mostly represented by, the ghost of Preacher Kane, introduced in Poltergeist II: The Other Side) seems to be capable of this, opening up spatial rifts that lead into other dimensions, warping rooms into Alien Geometries, controlling the weather and bringing everything from toy clowns and trees to braces and mirror images to life. Some of its powers involve creating illusions rather than truly reshaping reality, but the line between the two isn't always clear.
- Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (2022): The Master Emerald received an Adaptational Superpower Change so it's capable of doing this. In Doctor Eggman's hands, it allows him to teleport, sense electricity in people's brains, and reshape the metal from surrounding tanks, cars and trains into a Humongous Mecha in his image. The seven Chaos Emeralds sealed inside the Master Emerald are the main reason for its power. When Sonic uses said Chaos Emeralds, he transforms into Super Sonic, a Flying Brick with the ability to summon anything from thin air. Like chili dogs, for instance.
- In The Traveler, Mr. Nobody has such an ability whereby whoever hears his "confession", it will become a reality. Pretty broken ability for a ghost.
- Twilight Zone: The Movie: In "It's a Good Life", Anthony displays the ability to alter reality by creating monsters, bringing cartoon characters to life, transporting Ethel into a cartoon and stimulating the growth of plants.
