Keep to your seats! The history of the post-credits twist
If you happened to see the new Spider-Man film at the cinema recently, I hope you didn’t leave when the credits began to roll, said Paul Tassi in Forbes. Why? Because Marvel’s latest superhero movie, Spider-Man: Far From Home, contains two crucial tucked-away post-credits scenes which are as much a part of the movie as what has gone before. In the first of these – spoiler alert! – Spider-Man’s true identity is revealed to the world. In the second, we learn that throughout the film, the hero’s boss Nick Fury has in fact been a shape-shifting Skrull alien.
This trick of post-credits scenes actually has quite a history, said Amy Jones in The Daily Telegraph. Back in the 1960s, James Bond films ended with a message stating that 007 would return. Then in 1979, The Muppet Movie concluded with Animal, the frenzied hairy monster, turning to the viewers and screaming “GO HOME!” (a gag that would be copied by the 1986 comedy Ferris Bueller’s Day Off ). But it was 1985’s Young Sherlock Holmes which introduced the concept of the post-credits twist. After the credits had rolled, Holmes’s enemy, Professor Rathe, was revealed to be still alive and – shockingly – none other than his arch-nemesis, Professor Moriarty.
But it is Marvel – in the slew of superhero films that have dominated the box office over the past decade – which has made the technique its own. And if you think it indulgent of the studio to include two hidden scenes in their latest offering, bear in mind that there were no fewer than five at the end of Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 2, said Huw Fullerton in the Radio Times. In any case, we really should have the courtesy to sit through the end credits, said Amy Jones: it’s the one time the full crew that created the movie gets its due acknowledgement. If hiding a scene at the end is the only way to ensure this, so be it.