James Mangold Explains Why 'Logan' Has No Post-Credit Scene, Screenwriter Talks Cutting Professor X Flashback

**SPOILERS AHEAD**

It took seventeen years, but “Logan” finally gave fans the Wolverine movie of their dreams, and they rewarded the effort by turning it into a monster hit. If you’ve seen the movie, you know that part of the big reason it succeeds is that it strips the superhero movie down its bare essentials, and leans on character just as much as it does spectacle. More, director James Mangold and his team created a singular effort that doesn’t have to narratively tie into anything that comes before or after, giving them greater storytelling freedom. It also means they didn’t have to provide the now obligatory post-credits scene, and the filmmaker explains the reason behind that decision, and it’s a fairly simple one.

“The second it’s like, ‘Well, you’re supposed to serve cheesecake at the end of the meal,’ my response is, ‘Really? Is that the new rule? I can’t serve dinner at my house without cheesecake at the end?’ That’s a good enough reason not to do it. And really, what are those scenes but ads for another movie? We were trying to make a movie that begun and ended on its own terms. There was nothing else to say, because we had said it,” Mangold told The Toronto Sun.

That’s a very fair point, and honestly, a stinger would’ve only diminished the film’s powerful ending. It’s a smart move by a filmmaker who clearly had a firm hand on his material.

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Meanwhile, the story of “Logan” presents a diminishing Professor X, whose brain has been declared a weapon of mass destruction by the government, and who is haunted by an incident in Westchester — similar to unfolds during the casino sequence — that left scores dead, including X-Men. According to screenwriter Michael Green, they initially had scenes that would’ve gone more into Professor X’s past, but they decided to leave them out.

“It actually hits home a lot harder than the versions that really painted out specifically the flashback,” he told THR. “Of course there are versions we wrote that were never filmed with the actual flashback of what happened, but I’ve found the experience of watching it is far more poignant to just know that it was something really regrettable and it was bad and most likely, friends were lost. Or maybe it was people we didn’t know.”

“Nothing will be better than going online and reading fan theories about what happened at the end because I want to hear that version,” he added. “I know what I think happened, I even know what did happen, but it doesn’t matter, because what’s canonized here is the emotional effect of things.”

Again, another smart choice by the “Logan” team, whose overriding principle this time around seemed to be “less is more.” And it worked like gangbusters.

“Logan” is now playing everywhere.