in Film | November 28th, 2025 40 Comments

As hard as it may be to believe, some of us have nev­er seen a movie belong­ing to the Mar­vel Cin­e­mat­ic Uni­verse. If you’re one of those unini­ti­at­ed, none of the count­less clips incor­po­rat­ed into the Like Sto­ries of Old video essay above will tempt you to get ini­ti­at­ed. Nor will the laments aired by host Tom van der Lin­den, who, despite once enjoy­ing the MCU him­self, even­tu­al­ly came to won­der why keep­ing up with its releas­es had begun to feel less like a thrill than a chore. As if their CGI-laden sound and fury weren’t try­ing enough, there’s also “the con­stant quip­ping, the annoy­ing self-aware­ness, the fact that every­thing has to be a fran­chise now.”

Van der Lin­den labels a cen­tral fac­tor in the decline of the MCU “sto­ry­telling entropy.” Clas­sic films, you may have noticed, con­cen­trate prac­ti­cal­ly all the ener­gy in every facet of their pro­duc­tion toward the expres­sion of spe­cif­ic themes, sto­ries, and char­ac­ters; at their best, their every line, ges­ture, cut, and inven­tion rep­re­sents the tip of an artis­tic ice­berg. Take, to use a pop­u­lar exam­ple, the lightsaber intro­duced in Star Wars, which Van der Lin­den calls “not just a weapon, but a metaphor” that “sym­bol­i­cal­ly com­mu­ni­cates a lot about the phi­los­o­phy of its wield­er, and about the larg­er world that it exists in,” con­dens­ing “a mul­ti­tude of mean­ings and ideas into a sim­ple, sin­gu­lar object.”