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This post contains spoilers for The Marvels.
Let’s be honest, it’s tough times for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. After mixed bag misfire Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania led into the utterly dismal waste of time that was Secret Invasion, the MCU no longer demands the attention it enjoyed before Avengers: Endgame. Not even the excellent Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 or the really good second season of Loki seems to restore confidence.
All of which puts a lot of pressure on The Marvels, the last MCU movie released this year. The Marvels may be a sequel to the box office-breaking Captain Marvel, as well as great MCU Disney+ shows WandaVision and Ms. Marvel, but it’s tracking for a remarkably low opening, and one can sense the desperation in the final trailer for The Marvels. The emphasis in the marketing on extended universe stuff does a disservice to the meat of The Marvels itself. The movie teams Captain Marvel Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) with Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris), daughter of her best friend Maria, and Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani), the excitable kid who became Ms. Marvel. The adventure pits them against a Kree Accuser called Dar-Benn (Zawe Ashton) and brings them to new planets, such as the musical world of Aladna, ruled by Prince Yan (Park Seo-joon).
But as exciting as these developments are, the marketing for The Marvels really wants us to care about the post-credit sequences. So let’s get to it.
How Many Post-Credit Scenes with the X-Men Are in The Marvels?
People with small bladders, rejoice! The Marvels only has one post-credit scene, and it’s actually a mid-credits scene. It pops up after the main closing credits, which means you can safely exit the theater without looking at the name of every underpaid and highly overworked (and thankfully now unionized) VFX artists who worked on the film. Don’t worry, they all have families, so someone will watch them.
That said, the sound of mewing Goose kittens does play over the last minute or so of the credits, so if you didn’t get enough from the many, many scenes of Goose kittens in the proper movie, you can stick around to get one more taste. Of course The Marvels features a scene that feels like a post-credit scene, even though it happens before credits roll. So while it technically only has one scene, The Marvels feels like it has two.
But Are the X-Men In It?
Okay, yes. At the climax of the film, Monica Rambeau gets trapped in an alternate dimension, sacrificing herself to save our universe. In the only post-credit scene, Monica wakes up in a clean white room, the type that comes from the minds of early 2000s set designers. She awakens confused, but that quickly burns away as Monica looks to her side to see Maria Rambeau (Lashana Lynch), her dearly-departed mother.
Emotion overtakes Monica as she embraces her mother and begs forgiveness for leaving her to die during the five-year Blip. But Maria says little, clearly confused by this woman’s actions. A physician arrives to tell Monica that she’s entered an alternate reality and that Maria may not be the same person she knew before.
And as if to prove the point, Maria stands to reveal a costume that Monica has never seen, a red and white number with a zig-zag pattern. Comic readers recognize that costume as belonging to Binary, the moniker used by Carol Danvers when she became an energy-based being. This was before she finally took the name Captain Marvel. Binary might have been Danvers at her most powerful, back when she was able to wipe out entire civilizations.
Obviously, something different has happened here, just like the Maria Rambeau seen in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, where she took the name Captain Marvel instead of Carol and joined the Illuminati. And if the comic books are any guide, Maria can more than handle anything evil Wanda dishes out with her Binary power set.
I Don’t Care About Binary! Tell Me About the X-Men!
Well, Binary may never have been an official member of the X-Men, but she did help them fight the Brood. She also hung out for a while with the Starjammers, a team of space-pirates led by Cyclops’s dad, Corsair. So that should count as an X-Men for you, right? No? Okay, fine. There is the issue of the physician, a blue-furred man who introduces himself as Dr. Henry McCoy.
Hank McCoy is, of course, the Beast, one of the founding members of the X-Men. Moreover, he’s played here by Kelsey Grammer, who portrayed the character in the 20th Century Fox-produced movies X-Men: The Last Stand and briefly in X-Men: Days of Future Past. He stands in a lab designed like that of the Xavier Mansion in those movies and mentions Charles, obviously in reference to Professor Charles Xavier.
So yes, the X-Men are now in the MCU. Or are they? We’ve seen Fox X-Men drop by the MCU before, first with Evan Peters playing Pietro Maximoff in WandaVision (even if that turned out to be an Agatha prank), then Patrick Stewart as Professor X in Multiverse of Madness. Furthermore, we know that Hugh Jackman has grown out his mutton-chops to play Wolverine again in Deadpool 3.
Thus far, these have amounted to little more than cameos, not the actual, real live X-Men of the MCU. Stewart’s Xavier wasn’t even the Fox version of Xavier, with that film being set in yet another universe parallel to both the Fox films and MCU proper. So is Grammer’s Beast a sign of things to come or just another wink at characters not ready to make their proper MCU debut? This post-credit scene doesn’t help answer those questions, although if we had to guess Grammer’s Beast suggests that when see Monica Rambeau again, she’ll be coming into a major crossover film with more familiar faces…
The Other Post-Credits Scene That Isn’t a Post-Credits Scene
Beyond the X of it all, The Marvels includes the introduction of the next great team in the MCU comes with a question: “You think you’re the only kid superhero?” Strangely though, the query is not posed at the end of the movie (where we suspect it might have been originally intended for in the edit) but is instead, jarringly, the final scene of the movie before the credits. And if that question feels kinda familiar, it’s because Nick Fury said the same thing (kinda) to Tony Stark at the end of Iron Man when he began to assemble the Avengers.
The scene plays out pretty different in The Marvels, and not just because it actually happens before the credits roll. It begins with a shadowy figure entering a building and assuring her golden retriever that she brought home some pizza. The figure doesn’t need to walk in the light for us to recognize that good boy as Lucky the Pizza Dog, which means that our archer is Kate Bishop (Hailee Steinfeld), last seen in the delightful Hawkeye.
As if the unconvincing voice did not give it away, the person waiting in Kate’s home is not Nicholas J. Fury, but the far less intimidating Kamala Khan. But she has come here for a similar reason, to recruit Bishop into a team.
Although she does not say it, this team is likely the Young Avengers, a line-up that would also include Ironheart, America Chavez, and of course, the name-dropped Cassie Lang, known in the comics as the superhero Stature. The Young Avengers have been a long time coming, but this is the first official movement toward assembling those youngsters.
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