8 Post-Credits Scenes Marvel Didn’t Have The Balls To Shoot

By James Hunt / July 31, 2015

With the now traditional post-credits sting, Marvel has created a bit of a rod for its own back. It has reached the stage where they clearly have to include something, anything, but also do so in a way that fits either with the film you€™ve just watched, or teases the next one to be released. Often they€™ll have one of each.

It all began with the appearance of Nick Fury at the end of the first Iron Man film, which essentially set up the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe, but in doing so set a precedent that some subsequent films have struggled with.

Audiences wait around long after the credits have started to roll, and they want something to get excited about. The shawarma scene after The Avengers was great, because it was a joke that clearly tied into the movie, and was a bit different to anything else they€™d attempted.

But once you€™ve seen that, trying to repeat the trick doesn€™t always work. Howard the Duck was a fantastic gag, even if it offered little in terms of connecting to the wider universe; Tony Stark lying on a couch talking to Bruce Banner is a cute moment, sure, but was it really worth the wait? Probably not.

Others have gone down a more direct route of setting up a forthcoming movie, to the point where the post-credits sting for Captain America: The First Avenger was basically just one big advert for The Avengers.

They seem to miss more often than they hit, but there€™s a lot of scenes they could include that would leave Marvel fans squealing with excitement and desperate for more. These are the post-credits stings that they really should've shot€

8. The Red Room

While Natasha Romanoff is a key member of the Avengers, not a great deal is known about her past. We know she€™s had training as a Russian spy of some sort, but it is never fully explained what has caused her to become the way she is.

In Age Of Ultron her story is fleshed out a little more, with a flashback sequence and the reveal that she was sterilised to complete her training. It€™s used as a means of showing why she believes she can only date a fellow monster like Bruce Banner/Hulk, a romantic entanglement that came out of nowhere to dominate parts of Ultron.

While it was good for Black Widow to get a beefed-up role, there is far more to her as a character, and her backstory, than being a love interest, and it€™s something that they should show us more of. Her dark past is strongly hinted at in The Winter Soldier, and a post-credits scene at the end of that movie showing her Red Room upbringing - since seen in Agent Carter - would€™ve been great at fleshing out her history a little bit more, and helped explain her motives going into Ultron.

With a Black Widow movie still sadly nowhere on the horizon, it would€™ve been our best chance of getting to know the character better.