May we have your attention please...
Public service announcement is incoming...
Avengers: Age of Ultron — aka the movie that everyone on planet Earth will be seeing on May 1, 2015 — will have one striking difference to its forebear, structurally. The sequel does not have a post-credits "stinger" scene.
Remember the shawarma scene after the credits on The Avengers? Of course you do. It's impossible to forget, even though next to nothing happens in it. It was born out of a scene in the movie when Robert Downey Jr.'s Iron Man, having narrowly escaped death, mentions it in passing as something he wants to try.
Joss Whedon and the cast even reunited months after principle photography ended for the sole purpose of filming the shawarma stinger.
Tagged onto the very end of all ten previous Marvel movies have been stingers that pay off a gag from the movie proper, provide added closure, or tease a Marvel movie that's yet to come. Age of Ultron will mark the first time ever that a Marvel Studios film has broken with the after-the-credits tradition.
Whedon told Entertainment Weekly that they ditched the tradition because of his aversion to repeating himself — and because he didn't want to get caught in the trap of trying to top the shawarma scene.
However, fans should note that there is an additional scene at the end of the movie that plays moments after the credits begin. Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige said, "There will be a tag, but there's not a post-post-credit scene."
So, to sum up: Don't get out of your seat when the credits start, as an additional scene will begin to play momentarily. But once that scene is over and the credits start their long crawl up the screen, do go ahead and leave. Wasting ten minutes waiting around after that for nothing...
Well, that'd be enough to make the average movie-goer Hulk out.
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