When it was announced that Logan was to be Hugh Jackman’s final outing as Wolverine – the last hurrah, the curtain call, that one final job – speculation was rife that James Mangold had snuck in a post-credits stinger as a means of closing the book on Jackman’s X-Men saga.
Turns out 20th Century Fox did include a nod to another franchise (read: the first teaser for Deadpool 2), but it played before Logan and therefore existed outside the story world that Scott Frank, James Mangold, and Michael Green had created. Because let’s face it: Mangold has never been a fan of adding a post-credits stinger, and that’s something he reiterated – passionately, we might add – while appearing on Audi’s 2018 Writers Guild Association Beyond Words Panel in Los Angeles.
Via Cinema Blend:
The idea of making a movie that would fucking embarrass me, that’s part of the anesthetizing of this country or the world. That’s further confirming what they already know and tying in with other fucking products and selling them the next movie while you’re making this movie, and kind of all that shit that I find really fucking embarrassing. Like, that audiences are actually asking for scenes in end credits when those scenes were first developed for movies that suck, so they put something extra at the end to pick up the scores when the movie couldn’t end right on its own fucking feet.
Never one to mince his words, Mangold went on to claim that after-credits stingers are actually responsible for generating a hollow sense of excitement, as moviegoers have been conditioned to expect another endgame scene that can often undermine or even overshadow what has come before.
Now we’ve actually gotten audiences addicted to a fucking bonus in the credits. It’s fucking embarrassing. It means you couldn’t land your fucking movie is what it means. Even if you got 100,000 Twitter addicts who are gambling on what fucking scene is going to happen after the fucking credits it’s still cheating. It’s just cheating, but there are all sorts of bad habits like that that fucking horrifies me, man, that have become de rigueur in the way we make movies and I think the fear of being one of them that did that end then everyone’s patting me on the back and I feel like shit inside because I know I cheated, is probably the greatest thing that scares the shit out of me.
In related news, Logan is officially an Oscar nominee, and is in the running for Best Adapted Screenplay alongside such awards heavyweights as Call Me By Your Name and The Disaster Artist. Can James Mangold and his writing team make history on Sunday, March 4th? You’ll know as soon as we do.