James Mangold, director of The Wolverine and Logan, has one very serious pet peeve when it comes to all the other superhero movies out there. He hates post-credits scenes.
How much does he hate the post-credit stinger, popularised by Marvel and now de rigeur for any superhero movie with shared universe ambitions? Well, let him tell you in his own words, from this weekend’s Writers Guild Association Panel:
“The idea of making a movie that would fucking embarrass me, that’s part of the anesthetizing of this country or the world. That’s further confirming what they already know and tying in with other fucking products and selling them the next movie while you’re making this movie, and kind of all that shit that I find really fucking embarrassing. Like, that audiences are actually asking for scenes in end credits when those scenes were first developed for movies that suck, so they put something extra at the end to pick up the scores when the movie couldn’t end right on its own fucking feet.”
There’s more, from later in the panel:
”Now we’ve actually gotten audiences addicted to a fucking bonus in the credits. It’s fucking embarrassing. It means you couldn’t land your fucking movie is what it means. Even if you got 100,000 Twitter addicts who are gambling on what fucking scene is going to happen after the fucking credits it’s still cheating. It’s just cheating, but there’s all sorts of bad habits like that that fucking horrify me, man, that have become de rigueur in the way we make movies and I think the fear of being one of them that did that end then everyone’s patting me on the back and I feel like shit inside because I know I cheated, is probably the greatest thing that scares the shit out of me.”
Today, he went on to Twitter to clarify his views in a less profane fashion, saying, essentially, that he feels like post-credits stingers cheapen the power of films as standalone objects, weakening their ability to challenge and giving the audience false impressions of how movies work and create meaning.
2/ and at the same time, I feel like the omnipresent expectation of them cheapens the integrity of a theatrical experience as the movie doesn’t stick its ending but rather dribbles to an end with a series of pleasing vignettes/ads for the thing they will sell you next year…
— Mangold (@mang0ld) February 4, 2018
3/ So its not so much the scenes I despise as much as I fear that movies (an art form I deeply love) are not advanced when they are no longer functioning as a form with a beginning middle and end but rather as part of a serialized money machine.
— Mangold (@mang0ld) February 4, 2018
Lastly, the term “easter egg”‘s a bit infantile &, at least 2 me, feels condescending toward a thoughtful & intellectual audience that might be treated w/ more respect than imagining them as kids jumping around trying to guess storylines from breadcrumbs dropped by corporations.
— Mangold (@mang0ld) February 4, 2018
It’s an interesting point, and I can’t say I entirely disagree with him. Remember when we just, like, waited for the next movie? Those were kind of nice times.
[Cinema Blend & Twitter)