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After 3 Hours It's Not Worth Staying For The Batman Post-Credit Scene

Published Thu, 03 Mar 2022 18:47:12 -0600

No spoilers, I promise. I've just got back from seeing The Batman on general release in the UK. I saw it in a whole house on the IMAX screen at the local Kingston-Upon-Thames Odeon cinema. And before going into the movie, as I often do, I asked on social media what people would want to know before going in to see it themselves. The biggest question I got was whether or not there was a post-credit scene and was it worth staying after three hours of the movie to catch it.

Simply put, there is the tiniest sliver of a post-credit scene, but you could barely call it that. It is slightly more than "James Bond Will Return" but less – a lot less – than The Matrix Resurrections. No characters, just words. Very few words. I'll leave it at that.

It is unlikely that you will gain anything from waiting through all the credits, even that of Tim Sale. And given the movie is a total whopping three hours, you may want to get ahead out of the car park, get to the toilets before the queue, or be home before the babysitter turns into a pumpkin. In that case, the second the Batman logo pops up, so should you. Or course, if you are the kind of person I am who wants to eek every last second out of the experience and would probably be happy with a four-hour cut of The Batman with added brown smokey scenes, then, by all means, stay to the very bitter end. I did and have no regrets.

Movies, especially action movies and comic book movies like The Batman, have been increasing in length to bladder-bursting extremes, and the habit of placing post-credit scenes at the end of such films not only stretches that further, but the merest possibility that there might be one has led to audiences camping out in cinemas, with staff unable to clear up as usual. I talked to one usher a few months ago who told me that the post-credit scene is their biggest nightmare and has led to audiences waiting, just in case there is a post-credit scene in the most unlikely of movies.

What even would a post-credit scene for The Personal Life Of David Copperfield even look like? James Steerforth and Aunt Betsey Trotwood sitting around eating shwarma? And though many post-credit scenes are ephemeral, some like Eternals set up movies to come, and Thor: The Dark World contains the emotional apogee to the film. While for Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World's End, it is the essential end scene of an entire trilogy that some people who have seen all three films never saw… because after all that water, they really, really needed the bathroom.

The Batman is nothing like that. Stay if you want, not if you don't, but if you choose the latter, I can promise there will be nothing essential missing from your life.

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