Joss Whedon says there’s no post-credits scene in Age Of Ultron, but he might be lying
There’s a scene in 2008’s Iron Man that’s so monumentally important that future generations of film students will have entire textbooks devoted to it. After the credits have rolled, Samuel L. Jackson arrives, introduces himself as Nick Fury, and asks Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark if he can talk to him about “The Avengers Initiative.” Suddenly, every movie—especially every Marvel movie—needed to have a post-credits tag/stinger that either set up a sequel, acted as the payoff for a joke, or, preferably, did both.
Recently, though, the Marvel movies have become bloated and unwieldy, all thanks to their post-credits stingers—as well as an increasingly complicated mythology, but that’s beside the point. The Avengers, Thor: The Dark World, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and Guardians Of The Galaxy all had multiple stingers, forcing audiences to hold their bladders and sit around for the entire list of cast and crew if they didn’t want to miss out on Howard The Duck visiting the Captain America museum while eating shawarma. But now, Joss Whedon himself—a man known for killing off fan-favorite characters—has announced that he’s killing off this fan-favorite Marvel movie tradition with his upcoming Avengers: Age Of Ultron.
Speaking with Entertainment Weekly, Whedon said that Age Of Ultron will only have one quick mid-credits tag and “nothing at the very end.” He says he wanted people to know beforehand so they don’t sit through the entire credits and then get mad at him. Marvel’s Kevin Feige reiterates that “there will be a tag…but there’s not a post-post-credit scene.” In terms of Avengers tags, that means there will be an equivalent to that first appearance from Thanos, but not the shawarma gag. As for why he decided to do this, Whedon says he couldn’t top the shawarma scene, so he didn’t want to waste the audience’s time by just doing the same thing again.
However, Whedon also says that all of this is “not a fake out,” which just makes us more suspicious that it is a fake out. After all, Julie Delpy and Linda Cardellini do have secret roles in Age Of Ultron, and having them show up after the credits as Captain Marvel and She-Hulk (or whatever) would certainly be exciting—though they could show up in the middle of the credits, which would still be reasonably exciting. So there probably won’t be a “post-post-credits scene” attached to Age Of Ultron, but there might be, so you should sit through all of the credits anyway. You know, just in case.