10 Post-Credits Movie Scenes That Change Everything

1. Nick Fury - Iron Man

As the credits rolled on Iron Man, Marvel had already done the impossible, making a previously unknown character into a blockbuster icon and swiftly doing away with the whole secret identity handicap that had held back the genre since Richard Donner's Superman.

But much of the chatter regarding Tony Stark's debut film tends to deal with what comes after all that - in the sting, Stark returns home to find his Malibu mansion has been broken into by Nick Fury, who wants to talk about "the Avengers Initiative".

In a blockbuster landscape where regular audiences will now instinctively stick around until the very end, it is easy to take something so forward-thinking for granted (at this point in time Marvel had no real game-plan, with Thor and Captain America movies still glints in Kevin Feige's eye), so it's worth remembering how fresh an idea this was all the way back in 2008. It's the moment where it became clear Marvel weren't just going to go through the generic superhero movie motions and were eager to be genre trailblazers.

Very ahead of the times - it required sitting through ten minutes of scrolling text before it was cool and teased a superhero team the majority of audiences would have shrugged at the name of - in less than a minute of screen time the MCU was born, shared universes became the future of Hollywood and post-credit scenes became all but mandatory. So yeah, Nick Fury really did change everything.

Which other post-credit stings completely changed movies? Let us know in the comments below.