The post-credits scene has become a trademark of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Ever since we saw Samuel L. Jackson pop up in Tony Stark’s apartment in ‘Iron Man’ back in 2008 talking about the Avengers Initiative, each film from Marvel Studios featured a little something extra after the credits rolled. Whether it was foreshadowing the next movie from the House of Ideas or introducing fans to characters like Thanos, Quicksilver, Scarlet Witch, and Howard the Duck or watching Earth’s Mightiest Heroes grab a bite to eat, True Believers came to know that it was worthwhile to stay in their seats after watching a Marvel movie. However, it looks like we won’t be getting that in ‘Avengers: Age of Ultron’ next month.
According to an interview with Entertainment Weekly, director Joss Whedon revealed that there wouldn’t be a post-credits scene in ‘Age of Ultron.’ Despite the fact that the infamous shawarma scene from ‘The Avengers’ was filmed after the premiere of the epic blockbuster and added in later, the fan-favorite filmmaker explained that he wouldn’t be including something like that this time around:
“We all came at it separately—we don’t want to chase that. That was a jewel and a weird little quirk. … There is nothing at the very end. And that’s not a fake-out. We want people to know so they don’t sit there for 10 minutes and then go: ‘Son of a bitch! I’ll kill them!’
It didn’t seem to lend itself in the same way, and we wanted to be true to what felt right. The first rule of making a sequel is take the best moments and do something else. Don’t do the Indiana Jones gun trick again differently. Just go somewhere else. Don’t try to hit the same highs, because people will sense it.”
With that being said, we’re not getting absolutely nothing when the movie ends. Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige clarified that there will indeed be a mid-credits tag after the animated credits sequence similar to the one that introduced us to Thanos back in 2012:
“There will be a tag [a short, epilogue-like scene that pops up shortly after the credits start], but there’s not a post-post-credit scene.”
See that? You can relax now. Plus after you see the movie, you now know that you can leave the theater to talk about the movie sooner. But now that we know this, the theories for the tag can begin. Will it tie into ‘Ant-Man’, which we’ll see in theaters later this summer? Will it tease ‘Captain America: Civil War’? Or will it be a gag similar to the shawarma thing that will send Whedon off into the sunset by sending the audience of his last Marvel film as a director (for now) home with a smile? There are a lot of options here, so go ahead and share your thoughts and theories in the comment section.
‘Avengers: Age of Ultron’ starring Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Scarlet Johansson, Jeremy Renner, Robert Downey Jr., Elizabeth Olsen, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Paul Bettany, and James Spader assembles in theaters on May 1, 2015.