15 years ago, it was basically unheard of for moviegoers to sit through a film’s closing credits. As soon as the credits started to roll and the auditorium lights came back on, people would make a beeline for the bathroom and the exits. Who cares who made the thing? The movie was over.
That all changed with Iron Man, where, after the credits rolled, Samuel L. Jackson showed up to speak to Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark about the Avengers Initiative. Jackson wasn’t in the rest of the film at all; if you left early, you missed his entire appearance. Marvel was far from the first company to include a post-credits scene in one of their movies, but they popularized the conceit, and pretty soon almost every major blockbuster was copying them. All you need to do is look at Wikipedia’s list of post-credits scenes in movies to see how few there were before Iron Man, and how many there have been since then.
Marvel has generally done a good job of paying off their post-credits scenes; if one of their films ends on a cliffhanger you can be pretty sure you’ll see that thread picked up in another movie down the line. The same cannot be said for many of their competitors. The past 15 years are littered with examples of post-credits scenes that dangled all kinds of shocking twists and then just left them dangling forever when they were never followed up on again.
Below you’ll find 12 examples of those kinds of post-credits scenes, which promised audiences the world and then gave them a big old pile of nothing. Keep them in mind the next time you wait around in a theater as the credits roll.
Post-Credits Scenes That Never Got Resolved
Modern moviegoers love when blockbusters end on teases of what’s to come. But sometimes what’s to come never comes to pass, leaving these cliffhangers unresolved forever.
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