What Superman's End‑Credits Mean Amid Franchise Fatigue

Time​ Magazine

20 hours ago

Warning: This post contains spoilers for the endings of Superman, Sinners, and 28 Years Later.
Let's get this out of the way. Does Superman have an end-credits scene? Yes. In fact it has two. Do they matter? They do not. One involves Superman cuddling his dog Krypto—cute but not exactly offering up anything in the way of plot development. In another he banters with Mister Terrific, a superhero who helped save the world by closing up a portal to another dimension, about the imperfect alignment of the two halves of Metropolis that got ripped apart in that cataclysmic incident. Again, funny, but offers no hint as to the future of Superman or his various friends and foes in the DC Comics film adaptations.
The lack of substance in these two scenes may come as a surprise to many moviegoers. We've come to expect our summer blockbusters to conclude with a sequence buried in the credits that sets up the sequel or spinoff or next chapter in the superhero saga we just watched. The Marvel Cinematic Universe didn't invent the end-credits scene: '80s comedies like Airplane! and Ferris Bueller's Day Off wrote stingers for laughs. But the MCU jumpstarted the modern trend way back in 2008 when Samuel L. Jackson's Nick Fury showed up to recruit Robert Downey Jr.'s Iron Man into a new supergroup. (Spoiler alert: They're called the Avengers.)
Nearly every Marvel movie since has tacked on a scene or two during the credits teasing the upcoming movies in the franchise. Other cinematic universes—the DCEU, Fast & Furious, Pirates of the Caribbean, John Wick—followed suit, training audiences to stay put in their seats, just in case.
Superman is launching the brand new DCU (the DC Universe, rebranded from the old DCEU or DC Extended Universe). So one would expect Superman director and co-creative mastemind of the DCU, James Gunn, to seize the opportunity to tease one of the DC projects coming out next year like the Supergirl movie, the horror film Clayface, or even the HBO show Lanterns. But he opted for a more comedic direction instead.
Some fans might welcome the Superman stingers as refreshingly light diversions. After all, audiences seem to have rebelled against the amount of homework they've been asked to do to keep up with superhero films and series these days, a frustration that has manifested in cratering box-office returns and depressed streaming numbers. Others might wonder why they sat through a long string of credits only to be rewarded with style over substance. In theory, the answer might be the immeasurable value of learning the names of the many, many stunt performers and CGI programmers who worked on this film. But let's be real, you were probably scrolling your phone during the credits, weren't you?
It begs the question, what are post-credits scenes for these days, anyway? Three of this year's biggest movies—Superman, Sinners, and 28 Years Later—take three notably different approaches to their ending scenes. The evolution of the stringer suggests that directors are eager to evolve the rote end-credits scene into something more innovative or, let us hope, entertaining.
Sinners puts a crucial scene in the credits
On the opposite side of the post-credits scene conundrum from Gunn's Superman sits Ryan Coogler's Sinners: The horror film's mid-credits scene serves as an essential coda to the story. Before my press screening of that film, a docent was sent into the theater to instruct journalists to remain seated through the credits, despite the fact that by Coogler's own assertion, Sinners is a stand-alone work, not the first in a burgeoning vampire universe. Good thing he did, because without the heads-up, I would have missed a key moment of closure to the story.
The movie, set during the Jim Crow era, flashes forward to the 1990s. First comes a bit of stunt casting: Legendary blues musician Buddy Guy plays an aged version of the main character Sammie (portrayed in the rest of the movie by Miles Caton). He has grown from aspiring singer to successful musician playing a club in Chicago. Then, a moment of surprise: Vampire versions of Miles' family members, Michael B. Jordan's Stack and Hailee Steinfeld's Mary, have survived the epic battle at the end of the film and come to chat with Sammie. Coogler elicits a chuckle from the audience with Jordan's and Steinfeld's period-accurate, completely over-the-top '90s getups.
But the heart of the scene is the moment of closure for Sammie. Sammie once abandoned his priest father and religion to pursue the blues in a metaphorical deal with the devil. He found happiness in doing so, despite carrying the scars of the night when he summoned demons with his angelic voice. When Stack arrives at the night club, he tells Sammie that the old musician will die soon and offers to make him immortal. Sammie turns Stack down. Sammie has lived a full life but also seen the ills of the Earth and will be ready to depart. He admits that while the night he fought vampires and lost nearly everyone he loved still haunts him, the preceding day setting up the juke joint that Stack opened with his twin brother Smoke was the best of Sammie's life.
In a movie that wrangles with the complexities of religion and the vampiric state of a predominantly white-run music business that feeds on the creativity Black artists, among other themes, Sammie's happy ending—and, seemingly those of Stack and Mary—hold real power. The film is not complete without this conversation and Sammie's decision to forge his own path rather than the one laid out for him by the metaphorical devils and angels on his shoulder.
As I left the theater, I wondered aloud to a colleague why Coogler would have inserted that scene mid-way through the credits rather than simply ending the film on that moment. I worried that some audience members would walk out without seeing a crucial piece of Coogler's story, and when I saw the film again a few weeks later, at least a handful of people did. That's a loss. According to Coogler himself, "The whole script was about that moment."
Coogler, like Gunn, was forged in the fires of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the former having helmed two Black Panther movies, the latter three volumes of Guardians of the Galaxy. They seem to have come away from the experience with different lessons.
Marvel has recently developed a reputation for introducing character and plot points in post-credits scenes that never manifest in future films. There was the Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 spinoff super-team involving Sylvester Stallone and Michelle Yeoh that disappeared from the MCU. Charlize Theron popped up in the stinger for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, never to be seen again. Brett Goldstein made his debut as Hercules in a Thor: Love and Thunder end-credits scene that seems to be headed nowhere. And remember when Eternals previewed three different superheroes—Mahershala Ali as Blade, Kit Harington as Black Knight, and none other than Harry Styles as Eros— never to speak of those character again?
Gunn, newly minted as the head of a competing cinematic universe, might be wary of overpromising and underdelivering. Fair enough. But Coogler finds himself embracing what is, perhaps, inevitable: Movies of a certain size may always contain these scenes. And he decides to deliver poignancy and character development instead of that mild hit of serotonin we get from hearing a new superhero name dropped onscreen.
28 Years Later teases a trilogy pre-credits
That's all well and good if, like Coogler, you're determined to escape franchise filmmaking and direct movies that feel holistic and complete: The writer-director has said he has no plans to film a Sinners sequel. But what to do if you're helming one movie as part of a series and don't want to fall into the teaser trap? The latest entry in the 28 Days Later zombie franchise, 28 Years Later, offers yet another answer.
The new zombie film, directed by Danny Boyle, is the first in a planned trilogy. Nia DaCosta will direct a 28 Years Later sequel called The Bone Temple, and then Boyle plans to return for a third and final movie. Rather than relying on a post-credits scene to set up DaCosta's film, Boyle opted instead for a tonally jarring final act to his movie.
The bleak but moving film—whose third act brings the death of the main character Spike's mother and the birth of a miraculously uninfected baby from an pregnant infected—takes a major zag as Spike sets off from his old sequestered home to find his way alone on the dangerous mainland. A character named Jimmy, who appears as a young boy at the beginning of the film, returns as a full grown man. Flanked by a tracksuit-clad group of parkour enthusiasts, Jimmy rescues Spike from a horde of zombies.
The fighters call themselves the Jimmys and dress like Jimmy Savile, the British television presenter who was accused after his death of committing hundreds of instances of sexual abuse, many involving children. (In this universe, the zombie outbreak happened before Savile was outed as an alleged abuser.) Much of the film deals with icons of British culture—images of the queen, clips from Shakespeare adaptations, quotes from Rudyard Kipling—so a group of young boys' pop culture obsessions crystalizing when the infection took hold of the U.K. only for those young men to end up worshipping a monster does fit thematically in the film. Still, the allusion to a serial abuser has already stirred controversy.
Whatever the actual influences behind the finale, it seems a prime candidate for a post-credits scene because of its major tonal shift, its clear agenda to set up a sequel, and its distracting reference to a disgraced television personality. And yet Boyle eschewed the convention, perhaps a sign that directors are trying, in different ways, to free themselves from the tyranny of the end-credits.
Don't ring the death knell for the end-credits scene yet. It won't disappear. But it is evolving. Perhaps it's a sign that we have entered an era of post-MCU dominance. Captain America: Brave New World and Thunderbolts will probably end the year in the top 10 highest grossing films, but they were beaten out at the international box office by A Minecraft Movie, the latest Mission: Impossible, and a handful of children's films: Superhero movies are not the assured home run they used to be. As audience expectations shift in search of something more original that doesn't strictly follow the MCU playbook, we can expect more freedom and experimentation. That's always a good thing.
The next time you're watching a summer blockbuster in the movie theater, you might as well stay until the very end, just in case. You may see something unexpected. If nothing else, you may catch the names of a few hardworking grips and makeup artists.