Warning: This post contains spoilers for the endings of Superman, Sinners, and 28 Years Later.
Let’s get this out of the way. Does Superman have an end-credits scene? Yes. In fact it has two. Do they matter? They do not. One involves Superman cuddling his dog Krypto—cute but not exactly offering up anything in the way of plot development. In another he banters with Mister Terrific, a superhero who helped save the world by closing up a portal to another dimension, about the imperfect alignment of the two halves of Metropolis that got ripped apart in that cataclysmic incident. Again, funny, but offers no hint as to the future of Superman or his various friends and foes in the DC Comics film adaptations.
The lack of substance in these two scenes may come as a surprise to many moviegoers. We’ve come to expect our summer blockbusters to conclude with a sequence buried in the credits that sets up the sequel or spinoff or next chapter in the superhero saga we just watched. The Marvel Cinematic Universe didn’t invent the end-credits scene: ’80s comedies like Airplane! and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off wrote stingers for laughs. But the MCU jumpstarted the modern trend way back in 2008 when Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury showed up to recruit Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man into a new supergroup. (Spoiler alert: They’re called the Avengers.)
Nearly every Marvel movie since has tacked on a scene or two during the credits teasing the upcoming movies in the franchise. Other cinematic universes—the DCEU, Fast & Furious, Pirates of the Caribbean, John Wick—followed suit, training audiences to stay put in their seats, just in case.
Superman is launching the brand new DCU (the DC Universe, rebranded from the old DCEU or DC Extended Universe). So one would expect Superman director and co-creative mastemind of the DCU, James Gunn, to seize the opportunity to tease one of the DC projects coming out next year like the Supergirl movie, the horror film Clayface, or even the HBO show…
