Logan is a revolutionary superhero movie in more ways than one. Not only is it rated-R for violence, it’s also notable for the way writer-director James Mangold deliberately eschewed many of the conventions of superhero movies. Everything about Logan screams “this is not your usual superhero film” and that is not an accident.

One familiar superhero movie element Mangold left entirely out of Logan was the post-credits scene. Having a stinger at the end of the movie that teases another film within the universe is such a common practice in comic book movies that people have wondered why Mangold would deliberately not do one.

Mangold has now explained why he made the decision not to include a post-credits scene at the end of Logan, and it’s actually pretty simple: he didn’t think the movie needed one (via Toronto Sun):

Mangold went on to compare adding a post-credits scene to serving cheesecake at the end of a meal and likened tacking a teaser onto the end of the movie to doing an ad for another movie. He concluded, “There was nothing else to say because we had said it.”

“The only way we came out with a different movie was trying to do it differently. So I was pretty fanatical about saying, ‘If this is how these other movies are doing it, we’re going the other way.’ If there’s normally a cameo or an end-credit scene, we’re not doing that. That’s essentially turning it into a product that has to come out of the widget machine the same way every time and that’s not how the best movies are going to get made… in any genre.”

Some fans may see the lack of a post-credits scene as a short-change, so accustomed have they become to getting their metaphorical cheesecake at the end of the meal, but James Mangold makes it clear that he had no desire to play by those old rules when making Logan. That desire to create something original has resulted in one of the most critically-acclaimed superhero movies ever made. Logan’s box office hit $33 million on Friday and reportedly will reach $85 million in the first weekend. It’s hard to argue with Mangold’s approach.

The question now becomes whether other directors will adopt Mangold’s attitude and deliberately veer away from certain conventions of the superhero genre that don’t necessarily add nutrition to the meal. Studios no doubt will want to continue tacking teasers onto the ends of superhero movies, giving audiences that taste of what’s to come so it’s a convention that likely won’t be disappearing anytime soon.

Source: Toronto Sun

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