James Mangold Says Post-Credits Scenes Are “F—— Embarrassing”

Even though his last two films were firmly blockbuster superhero pictures — “The Wolverine” and the Oscar-nominated “Logan” — writer/director James Mangold has frequently taken pains to separate himself from the pack.

“Tentpole movies in general…they are not movies, generally. They are bloated exercises in two-hour trailers for another movie they are going to sell you in two years. There are so many characters that each character gets an arc of about six-and-a-half minutes at best, and I’m not exaggerating. You take 120 minutes, you take 45 of it for action, what are you left with, divide it by six characters, you have the character arc of Elmer Fudd in a Warner Brothers cartoon. That formula is empty for me,” he opined last March.

Even though he’s up for an Oscar, that didn’t stop Mangold from telling a room full of his colleagues exactly how he feels about post-credits scenes in blockbusters. Picking up on the thread from the aforementioned quote, the filmmaker unleashed his claws at the 2018 Writers Guild Association Beyond Words Panel last night, going on a tirade about making product driven movies, and using post-credits to try and salvage crappy movies.

“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,” Mangold said.

“Now we’ve actually gotten audiences addicted to a fucking bonus in the credits. It’s fucking embarrassing,” he added. “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’s all sorts of bad habits like that that fucking horrify 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 [at the] 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.”

Well, I guess that’s why there was no stinger at the end of “Logan.” Undoubtedly, Mangold is lighting a fire with those comments, but I would argue he’s being hyperbolic. I don’t think any end credits scene has saved a movie; if anything, their greatest sin is making audiences sit through ten minutes of credits for a sequence that’s either forgotten two seconds later or is so nerd deep, you have to go home and do research to figure out it means. That’s not even mentioning that — ahem — “The Wolverine” had a mid-credits scene….

Thoughts? Let us know in the comments section, but sorry Mangold, post-credits scenes won’t be disappearing anytime soon. [CinemaBlend]