10 MCU End Scenes That Were Scrapped

5. Nick Fury Mentions Mutants (Iron Man)

Iron Man post-credits scene Nick Fury
Disney

As the post-credits scene that kicked off the entire MCU, the moment when Nick Fury name-drops "The Avenger Initiative" at the end of the first Iron Man movie is arguably the most important moment in the whole franchise.

But it was almost a lot different - in a good way.

At one point in time, Marvel Studios was considering using a version of this tag in which Fury mentions "radioactive bug bites" and "mutants", directly hinting at Spider-Man and the X-Men right at the MCU's very beginning.

The interesting thing about this - y'know, besides the simple fact that it's Spider-Man and the X-Men - is that, at the time, Marvel Studios didn't have the rights to use any of these characters in MCU movies. So why even bother mentioning them?

Well, perhaps they just thought it would be a fun little reference, or maybe they were hoping to cut a deal with Fox and Sony. Regardless of the circumstances, the scene itself was ultimately scrapped, and replaced with the version we see today.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!