The cinema is changed. I feel it in the theatre.
I feel it at home. Much that once was is lost, for none now live who remember it-
Hang on. I'll be... back around shortly, you know, I really feel like
we were connecting there. When people talk about the Marvelization of
cinema, you probably already have some idea of what that means; the constant quipping,
the annoying self-awareness, the fact that everything has to be a franchise now. But these
criticisms alone never quite seem to get at the heart of the issue, because for every franchise
we criticize, there seems to be another that we praise. And for every joke we cringe at, there
is a similar one that does land. So what is the actual problem? What does it really mean when
we talk about the Marvelization of cinema? Well, in short, the problem, I think, has to do with a
phenomenon called storytelling entropy, which is a term I made up in an attempt to offer a more
unifying theory to explain, among other things; why you’re no longer keeping up with Marvel
like you used to. Why you love some sequels but not all of them. Where all these stupid jokes
came from. Why this worked and this didn’t, and for that matter, why this didn’t work either even
though it definitely should have, and why so many grand productions with movie stars that you really
like and with stories that have lots of potential nevertheless end up feeling completely hollow.
This video is brought to you by MUBI, go to mubi.com/likestoriesofold
for an extended free trial. First off; to explain the basic idea of
storytelling entropy, let’s consider the lightsaber. The lightsaber might just be the
most famous movie object ever created, with a look and sound that most people on the planet
will instantly recognize. And more than that, it’s not just that people know what it is, there’s
a good chance they also know what it stands for, because the lightsaber is not just a weapon,
it’s a metaphor. By virtue of its design alone, which suggests up close and personal combat,
yet with a dignified and elegant touch, it symbolically communicates a lot about the
philosophy of its wielder, and about the larger world it exists in. It even has a clear color
coding to signify, well, you know. The point is that the lightsaber condenses a multitude
of meanings and ideas into a simple, singular object. And as such, we can see it as an example
of anti-entropic storytelling. Anti-entropic, because it renders disorder into order, it takes
a plurality of story elements, unifies them, and then compresses them into their absolute essence.
Consciously or unconsciously, we generally admire anti-entropic storytelling because it
just adds so much richness to stories, and because it invokes the feeling that everything
is meaningful, purposeful and interconnected in a way that just makes sense. And though I’ve
only been discussing one story element here, the same principle holds true for every aspect
of storytelling; the characters, the plot, the worldbuilding, and so on. If you look at some
of the most beloved movies ever made, you can clearly see this anti-entropic movement reflected
in them; this intent to identify one core idea, be it Samurai’s defending a village from
evil bandits, a reluctant hero finding himself at the wrong place at the wrong time, or a group of
men fiercely debating the meaning of justice, and to then try and create the perfect encapsulation
of this core idea by capturing it within every story element and every filmmaking technique
and by condensing it to its absolute essence. These movies are obviously great, but from a
writer or filmmaker’s perspective, they can also form a bit of a frustration. Because going
back to the lightsaber, when you have something as cool as this, you obviously want more. After all,
you loved it, the audiences loved it, and also, it made a lot of money at the box office, and
might make even more the second time around. But here’s the problem: if you already have the
perfect distillation of an idea, where do you go from here? How do you top this? Well, as the
subsequent Star Wars movies show, if you cannot further compress, if you have already reached the
absolute essence of your idea, you can either keep it the same, or you can start adding complexity,
start changing elements that, ever so slightly, dilute the original concept. If maintained on
a small scale, this isn’t necessarily an issue, just some harmless variation. But when this
entropic movement starts taking place on a broader level… like, let’s say you have a really
iconic movie about humanity’s ultimate warriors facing the ultimate hunter, and you want more
of it. But because you obviously cannot go any butcher than this, you change humanity’s
ultimate warrior into a regular everyman, and when that turns out to be not very successful,
you start looking elsewhere. Let’s say you find another iconic movie monster, one that has its
own meanings and themes associated with it, but you don’t care, you move it into your own
story. A crossover event, that’s pretty cool, right? The critics might say no, but a 177 million
dollars at the box office definitely says yes, that’s more money than the original movies made
combined. This is the way. You forget about storytelling, forget about themes and meanings,
everything turns into content; content that can be smashed together, rebranded, revived. Everyone
is loving it, money starts flowing in like never before. You learn to embrace the disorder, the
outward expansion. What else is possible? Well you will soon find out, because you’re about to enter:
So now, for the main thesis: to live in the era of Marvelization is to live in a time
where storytelling entropy has become a widespread phenomenon that affects cinema in
a multitude of different ways, some obvious, others less so. And so, to properly discuss
the full scope of this new cinematic culture, I have broken it down into three key features
that, I believe, broadly capture its main characteristics, with the first and most
obvious being the rise of franchise-building. Mr. Stark, you’ve become part of a bigger
universe, you just don’t know it yet. Most of the blame for this one seems
to fall on Marvel. They did, after all, bring the idea of franchise-building into the
mainstream and started the trend of major studios actively planning ahead for crossover events and
other future stories that increasingly diminished the idea of the stand-alone movie. But it is
also a bit more complicated than that. In fact, there is an argument to be made that in the
beginning, Marvel was actually engaged in anti-entropic storytelling, it was just doing
so on a bigger scale than we were used to. Looking back on it now, it’s pretty obvious that
it was never really Marvel’s intention to use one movie to tell one self-contained story, or even
to create a series of movies in the traditional sense where you would end up with a few sequels
or a trilogy or something. Instead, they wanted to establish an entire cinematic universe containing
a vast multitude of individual movies that are all interconnected with each other, and that slowly
converge over time through a series of team-ups and showdowns until ultimately coming together in
one giant finale. That was their core idea. And if you just look at the Infinity Saga, starting
with Iron Man and ending with Avengers Endgame, I do believe they pulled it off. They took
this comic book idea of a shared universe that gradually expands, and brought us along
with it over the course of more than a decade to what is generally considered to be a satisfying
conclusion. Does this mean that every movie in the Infinity Saga was a masterpiece? No, but again,
that was never the point. Individual movies in the Marvel franchise are more like adventure
of the week kind of stories, they’re part of a continuum that isn’t designed to be groundbreaking
with each individual entry, but that occasionally crescendos in these more monumental events, and
that uses the time in between to connect us closer to the characters. Or at least, that’s how I
personally learned to appreciate these movies. So where then does franchise-building become
entropic? Where does it become detrimental to the actual storytelling? Well, we see this most
clearly in the way other studios looked at Marvel and took all the wrong lessons from it, took that
idea of a shared universe and employed it not so much as a storytelling device, but more so as
a marketing model. We saw this with DC which, among other issues, didn’t take the time to let
us connect with the characters and instead tried to force it’s grand finales into existence before
the audience was given a reason to actually care. We saw it with the Dark Universe which didn’t
really seem to consider if there even was a worthwhile connection between its stories and
characters to begin with. And we saw it with the recent expansion of Star Wars, which definitely
had potential as it offers a vast, fantastical universe with enough room for all kinds of loosely
connected stories, but which unfortunately still can’t seem to let go of the handful of
characters and storylines from the original trilogy that everything keeps coming back to.
But Marvel too is clearly struggling post-Endgame. We have more characters and more stories than
ever before, a lot of them now taking place in long-form on television, and it’s just becoming
too much. You know, it’s like the weekly adventure has become daily homework, which not only makes it
harder to keep up with everything that’s going on, but it also makes the interconnectivity feel less
meaningful. There still isn’t a strong set-up for a major storyline like the Infinity War. I know
they’re messing around with the multiverse, but we’ve only seen it very sporadically and I’m just
not feeling a strong sense of anticipation here. And also, there still doesn’t seem to be a strong
new cast of core characters. We’ve been introduced to dozens of new faces, but a lot of them seem to
come and go without being given a proper chance to become the new Iron Man or Captain America, to
become those leading characters who are a sort of constant in what is otherwise a sea of variables.
The important thing to remember about storytelling entropy is that it is persistent, it’s always
moving towards more and more disorder. And so, as it keeps pushing these franchises further
outwards into the void, further away from a unifying center, insofar as they were able to
establish one in the first place, it also starts to break down their more fundamental assumptions.
For in its most entropic, disordered state, franchise building is not about a shared universe,
it’s merely about recognizability, which leads us to the second key feature of Marvelization:
I should start by giving you some context. A while back, I went to go see the Dungeons and
Dragons movie, which was pretty fun. But at the end, when the main villain was all but defeated,
there’s this little joke. Regardless if you think it’s funny or not, that’s straight from the
Avengers, right? I mean, the meta-connection here is unavoidable, Marvel itself even did
a callback to it in Thor: Ragnarok. But why is it here in this completely unrelated movie? A
deliberate homage? A cheap rip-off? Either way, it seems to signify a form of interconnectivity or
meta-awareness that we’ve been seeing a lot more of, and that a lot of people seem to dislike..
Look for a box that says ‘MacGuffin’ Though not always. Because here again, the issue
is a bit more complicated than it initially seems. Being self-aware and including meta-commentary
is not bad in itself. It can be used very effectively in stories where self-reflection is
the point, where it’s actually an integral part of the story. We see this in movies such
as Synecdoche, New York, The Fabelmans or Asteroid City which are all specifically about
the dynamics of art and about the act of creation, and which therefore almost naturally draw
attention to their own storytelling. I’d even say Deadpool was successful in this sense because
the core idea of its central character is that he is a superhero who is more or less aware that
he’s inside of a superhero story, which makes it fitting that he occasionally comments on the
tropes of the genre that he’s being subjected to. Superhero landing, she’s
gonna do a superhero landing! Meta-commentary can also be included as a part
of the subtext that enriches the main story. Take for example how Christopher Nolan’s The
Prestige and Inception both symbolically reflect the dynamics of filmmaking to add weight to their
stories that, each in their own way, are centered around deception and crafting illusions.
You create the world of the dream, and they fill it with their subconscious.
The trouble starts when this kind of self-awareness is not connected to the actual
story, when it’s not contributing to the core idea but instead directs your attention
away from it. The most obvious form of this kind of meta-referencing that we’ve been
seeing a lot of recently is nostalgia-baiting. You know, I’m something of a scientist myself.
Here again, including nostalgia in a movie isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it is, after
all, a powerful emotion that’s part of the human experience and therefore worth exploring
through cinema. But when it doesn’t meaningfully contribute to the story at hand and is just
there for the audience’s sake in a “hey, remember this” kind of way, that’s when nostalgia merely
generates disorder or, you know, entropy. A few examples of this, with rising degrees of severity,
would be Benedict Cumberbatch weirdly emphasizing his real name is Khan in Star Trek Into Darkness
despite that name having no meaning to the characters in the story; Jurassic World pretty
much pausing the entire plot to soulfully remind you of the other dinosaur movie that was actually
good; and The Flash doing whatever this was… And the interesting thing is that, over time,
it feels like these kinds of references started happening even without the nostalgia factor.
Like the earlier mentioned Dungeons and Dragons example, there’s a ton of movies now that seem to
want to invoke some sense of interconnectivity, be it a reference to some other recent movie, or just
some inside joke. Take for example how Ghosted, a movie that has nothing to do with Marvel,
still had this sequence with a lot of ex-Avengers showing up, and Chris Evans doing his little
Captain America fists. Though these references were clearly deliberate, they are not true homages
as they have existed throughout cinematic history, that is; references in the form of loving tributes
to a movie or a filmmaker that, in some way, served as an inspiration, like the way John Wick 4
invoked the iconic scene transition from Lawrence of Arabia, or how the 2014 Godzilla reboot showed
its reverence for Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. No, these are references to nowhere,
references for the sake of making a reference. They are part of the wider memeification
of our culture in which recognizability equals entertainment; where our attention is
increasingly pushed into purposeless disorder, and where it becomes increasingly difficult to
engage stories with commitment and sincerity. Here, we might be moving into the broader
cultural issue of irony-poisoning; the idea that we can no longer communicate sincerely and
with vulnerability and have to turn everything into a joke instead. I have already discussed this
more thoroughly in a different video, but I do want to briefly bring it up again here because
I do believe that, from a purely storytelling perspective, this kind of ironic detachment is an
entropic force. Because when you have, let’s say, a character who is struggling with her identity,
you can create a nice little moment where she finds meaning in the kind words of someone
who cares about her, but if you then do this; What? Was that like really corny?
It was so corny. you immediately disconnect the audience from the
emotion of the scene, and undermine the core idea at the basis of her entire character arc. It’s
hard to say though if it’s because our culture becoming less sincere and more ironic that we have
more storytelling entropy, or that it’s because of this kind of storytelling entropy that we became
less sincere and more ironic; either way, I do think there is some relation here, and I don’t
believe it has served our stories for the better. The thing about both the rise
of franchise-building and the growing meta-awareness is that they’re not
necessarily driven by storytellers themselves, but by the larger industry they exist in. And
this brings us to the final and most nebulous key feature of Marvelization:
They took your story, and turned it into something trivial.
Now, I’m not an industry insider, and so I don’t want to go too deeply into the broader
industry developments that have undoubtably been affecting how movies are made, such as the rise
of streaming services and the decline of the movie star and the mid-budget production, but I do want
to explore the more indirect effect that these developments have had on the actual storytelling
in movies, even if this is based on more of an intuitive feeling than a factual observation. Not
too long ago I was watching The Rings of Power, the Amazon series based on The Lord of the Rings
and the broader mythology that surrounds it, and this is coming from a huge Lord of the
Rings fan, someone who was genuinely hoping to be transported back into this world in the same
way that I was when the first movies came out, but I just wasn’t feeling it, not even a little
bit. There are some clearly observable problems with its storytelling that contributed to this
lackluster experience, but even when putting those aside, there just wasn’t any magic here.
It’s a feeling I have been having a lot in the recent years, the feeling that all the projects
that should appeal to me, and that seem to be given the time and the budget to really become
something special, and that on the surface look like they’re doing everything right, I mean, look
at these shots, they’re beautiful, right? And yet, they do nothing for me. Try as I might, I
can’t seem to connect with these new stories. I wondered, as any disillusioned adult at one point
does, is it just me? Am I romanticizing movies like The Lord of the Rings just because they were
meaningful to me during my formative years? Well, to make sure, I treated myself to a little 4k
Ultra HD trip down memory lane, and I realized that no, it’s definitely not me. These movies are
as incredible as they’ve always been. But it got me thinking. Part of why I loved the Lord of the
Rings so much was not just because of the movies themselves, but also because of how they were
made. The Lord of the Rings was one of the first movies to come out with an extensive making-of
series which, apparently, isn’t included with the new Blu-ray. – There we go – The appendices, as
they were called, detailed the entire production process from the writing of the script, to
scouting the locations, building sets, finding the cast, basically everything from beginning to
end. And the one thing that always stood out to me was the sheer amount of passion that was just
so palpable in everyone and everything. To the 12 year old that I was, it made filmmaking look
like a magical experience, and this may have just been projection, but I’d swear I could feel
this passion shining through in the final product. It makes sense that passion is an anti-entropic
force when it comes to storytelling, perhaps even one of the strongest ones, because passion is
what drives filmmakers and everyone involved in the filmmaking process to work with absolute
commitment to condense their vision to that absolute state of perfection. And this is exactly
what so often seems to be missing today. When you look at many of the bigger properties in recent
years, it just feels like they’re not initiated by this kind of creative passion, but rather by
studios and producers that want to make certain movies or TV shows not because they’re just
yearning to tell these stories but because they’re part of bigger vision, a more entropic vision
that looks outward to include financial ambitions, marketing strategies, franchise potential
and all those things that don’t serve the actual storytelling. It’s the difference between
creating Game of Thrones, and creating a show like Game of Thrones. The first is born from the
passion to create something new, in this case; to bring a complex and subversive fantasy story
to a wide audience that normally wouldn’t be into this kind of thing. The second one just
recognizes the success of something else and wants something similar. In other words, when it
comes to corporate passion it’s not so much about the actual story but about the appearance of a
certain kind of story. I don’t believe Amazon was just aching to create Citadel, they just wanted
an international spy series. Similarly, I don’t buy that anyone was dying to create The Gray Man,
or Red Notice or Ghosted, they were just items in the bigger streaming service shopping cart that
were selected because, building on the previously discussed features of Marvelization, they had
enough recognizable elements and enough franchise potential to be worth pursuing. Through this lens,
we can also see why Game of Thrones deteriorated so significantly over the years; the passion
behind it turned entropic; instead of focusing on quality storytelling, the showrunners became
increasingly concerned with fan service and with staying ahead of audience speculation which caused
them to make rather poor alterations to their original vision. And instead of sticking with the
show until its natural ending, they got distracted by the promise of other projects which resulted
in them carelessly rushing towards the end. To be clear, I don’t want this to sound like
a black and white, fundamentally good versus fundamentally bad kind of thing, it’s definitely
not as dramatic as that. Passion projects still have to deal with the business side, and corporate
ordered products obviously still have passion involved. If you look a little closer at how
Amazon acquired the partial rights to Tolkien’s work to make their Rings of Power series, it
becomes clear that the showrunners they hired are genuine fans and creators with the best of
intentions. And I believe the same is true for JJ Abrams for example when he was selected to reboot
Star Wars, and for Colin Trevorrow when he got to do the same for Jurassic Park. But still, I can’t
help but feel there’s a noticeable difference, even if only on a subconscious level, between
movies that came into being because passionate filmmakers relentlessly pursued that green light
from the studios, and movies that were first “ordered” by studios and had those passionate
filmmakers coming in later. Perhaps the most shining example of this is the Hobbit trilogy,
which had the same filmmakers behind it as the Lord of the Rings, but which just wasn’t the same.
The many behind the scenes problems of the Hobbit movies have already been widely documented,
but the main one I want emphasize here is that they were initially Guillermo del Toro’s passion
project, and were only later given to a reluctant Peter Jackson after a conflict with the studio. In
other words, when it comes down to it, The Hobbit was essentially The Lord of the Rings, but made
with corporate passion instead of genuine passion. And to me, the results speak for themselves.
What have we done? Despite Marvelization currently being a
significant movement in cinematic culture, arguably the dominant one, it’s not
all-encompassing. No single trend in cinema ever is. There’s obviously always interesting stuff
being made outside of the bigger studio systems, but even within them, there are notable exceptions
of movies that, on the surface, could easily have become another victim of Marvelization, but
somehow managed to break free and deliver some genuinely great cinematic experiences. So how
did they do it? Well, on that purely storytelling level we’ve been discussing, it’s actually
pretty simple: just reverse the entropy again, make original movies like Oppenheimer and Barbie
that stand on their own without being forced into some larger cultural or cinematic framework
of purposeless meta-references, and that have passionate filmmakers driving the production. Then
burn down every existing franchise and just, wait, actually, that’s a bit too easy, right?
Because how about all those sequels and franchise entries that we do love? How about-
Top Gun Maverick was widely celebrated as a grand return to classical cinema, and sure, the movie
had no business being as good as it was, but what was it really that made this feel so classical?
The fact that they flew in actual planes? They didn’t even do that in the original. That it
told a stand-alone original story? Not really, it was still a sequel filled with nostalgia. What
then separated it from movies like Ghostbusters: Afterlife or the latest Indiana Jones?
That it was just really, really good? No, I think we can do better; I think the real reason
why Maverick was such a success is because it is one of the rare examples in which a sequel takes
the essence of its original idea and refines it even further. In other words, it continued a story
while not only avoiding storytelling entropy, but it actually managed to be anti-entropic.
Because what’s the essence of Top Gun? It’s about these elite, best of the best pilots who have to
push themselves to reach even greater heights, right? And the original definitely captured that,
but not perfectly. If we ignore the cheesiness and just look at the actual story, you can see
that the plot tends to meander a bit between different elements that are connected, but not
as tight as it could have been. And this is exactly what’s different about Maverick.
Pentagon has tasked us with assembling a strike team and taking it out.
By presenting us with a highly dangerous mission right at the very
beginning, we have this clear arc that takes all those other elements, the rivalry,
the love story, the conflicts with the brass, and so on, and unites them into a more singular
concept. It’s like the movie recognized that the original was actually that sword-lightsaber, and
subsequently found a way to shave off the needless complexity and leave only the absolute essence.
Again, this kind of anti-entropic refinement is quite rare, especially for sequels. It usually
takes a full on remake as we saw with The Thing, Ocean’s Eleven, Invasion of the Body Snatchers,
and with what is shaping up to be the definitive adaptation of Dune. I think the best other
example of a sequel going anti-entropic would be the Mission Impossible series, which
initially played around with different forms of stylization and background stories before
refining its core idea down to the basics; providing entertaining espionage action and
awe-inspiring stunt work. As an added bonus, which is also true for the John Wick series, if the core
idea is less about the actual story and more about how that story is told, that is; if it’s more
about the action and the stunts, then it’s also a lot easier to do the same thing multiple
times before the entropy starts kicking in. But there are other ways for sequels to build on
a mostly perfectly idea without becoming entropic. There is the James Cameron way, which means that
if you’ve already got a highly regarded classic, two of them actually, with no way to further
perfect them. Instead of telling the same story again in a watered down or more convoluted way,
what you can do then is go back to the premise and change the core idea. Turn the claustrophobic
horror experience into a sprawling action thriller. And that machine that came back
from the future to destroy humanity, well, let’s have it come back again to protect it. By
making these changes in the fundamental premise, Cameron could still explore the same central
themes that were present in these stories, but do so from an entirely new starting point,
which changed their context enough for them to not only feel fresh, but actually feel deepened
and expanded upon. Another great example of this is of course The Dark Knight. The previous
movie, Batman Begins, was a solid superhero origin story about how Bruce Wayne became Batman
and changed Gotham City. But the Dark Knight, as I’ve already discussed in my extensive review
of Nolan’s filmography, flips that premise around by confronting Bruce with the unintended
consequences of his own actions. It changes Batman from an active to a reactive protagonist,
and in doing so, deepens the vigilante tale with a whole new layer of fascinating
complications and philosophical questions. I’ve seen now what I would have
to become to stop men like him. Related to the James Cameron way, there’s
also the Francis Ford Coppola way, which I also like to refer to as envelopment, where
you take your core idea, and make it part of a bigger one. The Godfather was a story of one
man’s corruption, but after The Godfather 2, that story became part of a multi-generational
saga that framed that corruption into a greater cycle of violence and family tragedies. The other
obvious example here would be the original Star Wars trilogy, which took its archetypal hero’s
journey from A New Hope, and turned it into the first stage of an even greater one by adding
that second act conflict and desperation on a grand scale in The Empire Strikes Back and then
using The Return of the Jedi to complete the new cycle. The key factor here, which is all too
often forgotten, is knowing when this bigger story is completed. Or for that matter, when any
story or idea is completed. Great storytelling, anti-entropic storytelling is about creation,
continued creation. It’s about making something beautiful and then doing it all over again from
a new point of inception. Entropy is the opposite of that, it’s the outward movement towards that
slow death that’s always just over the horizon; a purgatory of empty eyes and hollow beauty, of
faded originals and crystal clear forgeries. It’s the forgotten memory of what was once real,
and what can be real again. But in order to achieve that, we have to be able to move
on, we have to allow our stories to end- The problem with trying to construct a unifying
theory is that it’s never truly exhaustive, and neither is this one. I tried to focus as much as I
could on the issues that I think are most directly related to the actual storytelling in movies, but
because of this, I had to exclude many others. One such element that I think is also highly
important but which is more indirectly related to the current state of cinema, is the problem
of us, the audience, and the way our engagement with movies has changed. Because even if there are
plenty of great movies out there, and there are, this era of Marvelization has also made it so
easy for us to fall into our own entropic state in which we just mindlessly consume whatever
we are presented with, and passively settle for those cheap thrills of recognizability and the
fleeting comfort of empty nostalgia. There are, however, ways to break out of this cycle as well,
and to become more actively engaged with cinema again. Over the years, I’ve personally used a
few strategies that I’ve found really helpful and really enjoyable, and luckily for you, they
are now easier than ever thanks to MUBI, you know, the curated online cinema streaming handpicked
exceptional movies from around the world. But first, here’s what I used to do when I was feeling
a bit uninspired, what I did was I categorized movies together so I could really immerse myself
into the work of a specific director or a certain era of filmmaking. But this was easier said than
done as I often found myself not knowing where to look or where to go next. And that’s what’s so
great about MUBI. Again, MUBI is a curated online cinema meaning that every movie is carefully
selected so you know you’re always going to be watching something interesting. And furthermore,
they offer lots of fascinating series that have connected me to filmmakers, subcultures and entire
genres that I otherwise wouldn’t even have known about. It’s just such an incredibly refreshing and
enriching way to explore the best that cinema has to offer, and to reinvigorate your passion for it.
If you want to try it out for yourself, you can do so by going to mubi.com/likestoriesofold to get
30 days for free. That’s mubi.com/likestoriesofold to claim your extended free trial, and
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