As X-Men movies go, Logan was about as good as it gets. Taut, intense, smart, beautifully acted, it ending the saga of Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine in high style. And when I say it ended it, it ended it. A final shot, cut to black, closing credits, and that’s it. There was no post-credits scene or any hint of what could come next for the X-Men movie universe.

There is a reason for this: Logan writer/director James Mangold hates post-credits scenes. Speaking at the 2018 Writers Guild Association Beyond Words Panel (via Digital Spy), here’s what Mangold had to say about scenes after the credits:

“Now we’ve actually gotten audiences addicted to a fucking bonus in the credits. It’s f—ing embarrassing. It means you couldn’t land your f—ing movie, is what it means. Even if you got 100,000 Twitter addicts who are gambling on what f—ing scene is going to happen after the f—ing credits, it’s still cheating. [They’re] selling them the next movie while you’re making this movie, and kind of all that shit that I find really f—ing embarrassing.

Mangold elaborated further in a thread on his Twitter account:

Of course they feel good. They are designed to do that, like ads, as they hook you to buy the next film/s, and at the same time, I feel like the omnipresent expectation of them cheapens the integrity of a theatrical experience as the movie doesn’t stick its ending but rather dribbles to an end with a series of pleasing vignettes/ads for the thing they will sell you next year. So its not so much the scenes I despise as much as I fear that movies (an art form I deeply love) are not advanced when they are no longer functioning as a form with a beginning middle and end but rather as part of a serialized money machine.

James Mangold, I am here to say: I agree with you. I’ve written about this before. A few post-credits scenes are good, but the more they become required, the less special and the less interesting they become. A lot of them flat-out stink, even in good movies. Not to mention the fact that with the way Logan ended, Mangold’s finale and its emotional impact would have been completely undercut by a post-credits scene. So he was right in this specific instance, and he was largely right in general.

Gallery - The Best and Worst Superhero Post-Credits Scenes:

 

 

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