There’s one thing that Marvel used to do better than any other studio, and that’s build hype. Ever since the series debuted with Jon Favreau’s “Iron Man” in 2008, these superhero films were filled with promising easter eggs and, in a game-changing creative masterstroke, post-credits scenes that promised future characters and crossovers and villains, which Marvel then actually delivered.
Now, Marvel has made its worst MCU post-credits scene ever with the tag for “Captain America: Brave New World.”
Marvel didn’t invent the post-credits scene — so-called because they drop after the closing credits (sometimes spiked with a mid-credits scene as well or instead) — nor did they make the first good one. The first, according to most historians, came at the end of the 1966 spy comedy “The Silencers,” starring Rat Pack crooner Dean Martin as Matt Helm. The scene depicted Helm on a bed, either pre-or-post-orgy, with a cadre of scantily clad, beautiful women, and a title card teasing his next adventure, “Murderer’s Row.” Martin, atypically stressed out by his own virility, simply put his head in his hands and cried, “Oh my God.”
For decades post-credits scenes were rare, and usually empty promises. Matt Helm delivered on his follow-up film but when Skeletor emerged from a liquidy grave at the end of 1987’s “Masters of the Universe” and screamed “I’ll be back!”, he was lying. Barry Levinson’s excellent prequel “Young Sherlock Holmes” concluded with the film’s villain revealing he was actually Holmes’ future arch-nemesis Moriarty the whole time, which also went nowhere. And of course there were lots of comedy codas, like Animal telling the audience to go home at the end of “The Muppet Movie” and Ferris doing likewise at the end of “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.”
The difference with Marvel Studios was that when Nick Fury invited Tony Stark to join the Avengers Initiative at the end of “Iron Man,” it didn’t just tease a sequel. It teased an interconnected franchise. Audiences were told that Iron Man would be back, which we already assumed he would if his movie made money, but also that he’d bring the rest of the Avengers with him, in a crossover unlike anything the world had seen since the 1968 kaiju team-up “Destroy All Monsters,” or the late-era Universal Monster movies “House of Dracula,” “House of Frankenstein” and “Abbott and Costello Meet [insert monster here].”
When Tony Stark showed up in a post-credits scene for “Incredible Hulk,” just one month later, Marvel’s promises became tangible. These were not just empty teases, they were — even though a lot could have gone wrong in those days — at least the start of a plan. So audiences quickly learned not to rush to the bathroom as soon as the credits rolled in a Marvel movie. You’d probably miss a sneak peak of a brand new superhero, or a brand new villain, or at least a hilarious scene where the exhausted Avengers eat shawarma.
The genius of the Marvel post-credits scene wasn’t that all of them were great, it’s that all of them had value. Either they were an exciting preview or, in larks like Captain America’s PSA about patience and disappointment at the end of “Spider-Man: Homecoming,” at least a gag worth sticking around for. These teases had massive value to Marvel Studios as well, since they left customers buzzing about the next movie as well as — and often, sadly, instead of — discussing the film they just saw. The Marvel post-credits scene quickly became a fine-tuned engine of anticipation.
Like all engines, the Marvel post-credits scene developed some wear-and-tear. There are now multiple teasers that have, to date, gone absolutely nowhere, breaking the promise Marvel once made with its audience that they always follow through. Baron Mordo started stealing magic at the end of 2016’s “Doctor Strange” and nine years later literally nothing has come of it. “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” promised more of Kang the Conqueror and let’s just say that’s not happening any time soon, or ever.
And then of course there’s “Eternals,” which teased the introduction of the vampire hunter Blade (which still hasn’t happened), the British superhero Black Knight (nothing yet either), and also introduced as Harry Styles as Eros, a superhero whose powers include brainwashing people into a state of attraction and arousal, which eventually put him on trial in the comics for sexual assault. It’s hard to get worked up about that guy never coming back again.
It’s been argued, rather successfully, that Marvel Studios fell into a creative rut after “Avengers: Endgame,” a once-in-a-lifetime cinematic event that successfully and satisfyingly ended the story of the Marvel Cinematic Universe as we knew it. The problem was that after years of planning, Marvel didn’t have a clear vision of what came afterwards, or at least it failed to convey that vision to the audience. The sense of momentum leading up to the Infinity Saga had understandably dissipated and now there was nothing to replace it except… the multiverse.
Marvel had been promising a big multiverse story ever since the first season of “Loki,” when the so-called “sacred timeline” was shattered, ushering in a plethora of alternate realities, many of which the audience had seen before in separate or pre-existing superhero franchises. The tease of a massive multiverse crossover was promising, and could have been milked for a few years, just as Marvel had built up the Infinity Stones, gradually bringing the storyline together over the course of many films.
The problem with Marvel’s multiverse is that the promise of a giant superhero multiverse crossover was already old hat by the time Marvel got to it. “Loki” introduced the concept to the MCU three years after a giant superhero multiverse crossover called “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” had already won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. Just a few months after the first season finale of “Loki,” Marvel and Sony released “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” a live-action multiverse crossover that made a billion dollars. Less than a year later, Doctor Strange traveled through a “Multiverse of Madness,” and by the beginning of 2022 the genre-defying “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won an Oscar for Best Picture. “Deadpool and Wolverine” made over $1 billion last year. Even DC had already gotten in on the action, with an extremely ambitious TV crossover based on the classic comic “Crisis on Infinite Earths,” and a failed attempt to soft reboot the DC Extended Universe with the notorious 2023 flop, “The Flash.”
The concept of a multiverse has long since been introduced to audiences, successfully, in and out of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The cat is simply out of the bag, and yet here we are, in 2025, and Marvel has just released “Captain America: Brave New World” which [spoiler alert] ends with a post-credits scene that teases — brace for it — the concept of a multiverse.
Hashtag facepalm.
It is hard to fathom just how redundant and pointless the “Brave New World” post-credits scene actually is. It consists of two shots, with Anthony Mackie’s Captain America staring into the camera and the film’s villain staring into the camera, suggesting that the actors weren’t even in the same room and this whole teaser was a half-hearted afterthought. The villain vaguely claims something is coming, and that the thing is the multiverse. He even claims he knows this because he’s seen all the variables, but who needs variables? The multiverse is already an accepted fact in the MCU, and definitely to the audience. Nobody is impressed that this guy knows what’s coming. We’ve all known what’s coming for almost half a decade.
To quote Monty Python: “Get on with it!”
Marvel went from making promises and delivering within the year to making promises it never followed up on, to making promises it’s already followed up on, and multiple times. There’s literally a three-season Marvel TV series called “What If” that just bounces around the multiverse every episode. We understand that dropping Kang as the new “big bad” robbed the MCU of some forward momentum, but the multiverse has had zero momentum for four years because Marvel keeps pretending it’s on the horizon and not right here, right now. We’ve had it for years and it’s already getting boring. Even Deadpool, who spent most of “Deadpool and Wolverine” shamelessly praising Marvel Studios, admitted “It’s just been miss after miss after miss,” and suggested “just take the L and move on.”
I hate to say this but Deadpool is right. “Captain America: Brave New World” has problems, and a lot of them, but this post-credits scene and its failure to acknowledge reality, singular or multiple, isn’t just a problem for the new film. It’s a problem for Marvel in general. There is no discernible promise for this franchise’s future, even with big announcements like “Doomsday” already on the books. We no longer leave the theaters talking about how exciting the future is, and since most of the recent Marvel movies have been underwhelming on their own, we don’t want to talk about the movie we just saw either.
After years of getting it right, Marvel Studios made us stop talking about their films. At least not the way we used to. We no longer live in an era of perpetual anticipation — which the late, great film critic James Rocchi wisely pointed out had serious problems to begin with — because audiences no longer have any faith in or patience for Marvel’s vague, years-too-late crossover plan. We have nothing to look forward to right now except the movies immediately ahead of us, and since the once-reliable standard of Marvel Studios quality has turned inconsistent at best, it’s hard to look forward to those much either.
We have, for now, run out of reasons to marvel.
