Captain Marvel: post credits scenes explained

But beware – if you haven’t watched the movie yet, a few spoilers lurk beneath…

• What can Captain Marvel tell us about the plot of Avengers: Endgame?
• Everything you need to know about Captain Marvel
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Captain Marvel post-credits scene one

The first post-credits scene picks up more or less exactly where we left things at the end of Avengers: Infinity War, when that movie’s post-credits scene had Nick Fury (Samuel L Jackson) call Captain Marvel on a souped-up pager.

Now the pager sits inside Avengers HQ, where rolling computer displays show the increasing numbers of people who dissolved at the end of Thanos’s “snap”, to the horror of the remaining Avengers (the above shot from the Endgame trailer takes place in the same location).

“This is a nightmare,” Chris Evans’ Captain America says.

• What does Captain Marvel tell us about Avengers: Endgame?

Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow is even more downbeat: “I’ve had better nightmares,” she says.

It’s here that we learn what has become of the pager after Fury dropped it at the end of Infinity War. Now held in a clamp and connected to a new power source, Mark Ruffalo’s Bruce Banner has had its signal going for a long time – but today it’s finally cut out, and Black Widow insists that they get it back online.

After all, sending out the signal was Nick Fury’s final act, so it had to help – right?

“I wanna know who’s on the other end of that thing,” she says. She gets her answer when Brie Larson’s Captain Marvel appears behind her.

Finally summoned back to Earth nearly a quarter of a century after her last visit, Carol is sporting a slightly different haircut – long exile or time travel will probably do that to you – and only has one question for the people in front of her.

“Where’s. Fury.”

Hopefully they can break the news to her gently…

The impression given by this post-credits teaser is that it’s actually a scene taken from the beginning of Avengers: Endgame, especially considering the actors involved: in addition to those mentioned above, Don Cheadle’s War Machine also features in the scene.

Still, you never know: Doctor Strange contained a similar teaser scene from Thor: Ragnarok that ended up being quite different in the finished movie, so it could be that a slightly altered cut ends up in Endgame.

Considering there’s only six weeks between the releases, though, it probably is an Endgame clip.

Captain Marvel post-credits scene two

The second and final Captain Marvel post-credits scenes is more of a comedy coda to the film, as has become traditional in recent years.

At Nick Fury’s empty desk (where the film proper concluded) we see pet alien/cat Goose jump on the table and begin hacking up a hairball.

Instead of hair, though, Goose eventually unloads the Tesseract, the powerful cube-shaped energy source which unexpectedly returned in Captain Marvel having previously driven the plot in Captain America: The First Avengers, the first Avengers movie and Avengers: Infinity War (where it was returned to its Infinity Stone form and taken by Thanos).

• Will there be a sequel to Captain Marvel?

In Captain Marvel, of course, the Tesseract is a good few years away from its importance to the Avengers (bar Captain America, who encountered it in World War Two), making it possible for the film to include it as a crucial MacGuffin only saved from the forces of evil when Goose swallowed it for safekeeping.

Basically, this scene connects the dots between Captain Marvel and the Avengers, explaining how SHIELD got its hands on the Tesseract again while also adding a little note of comedy to offset the slightly darker Endgame sneak peek.

Now, all we have to do is wait to see if Goose survived the snap as well…

Captain Marvel is in UK cinemas now