AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
You might have experienced this in a movie theater. The credits start to roll, you gather your things, you start shuffling down the row of seats, and then a whole new scene starts playing. In the movie "Sinners," which is in theaters right now, that's exactly what happens. That got our Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast team thinking about what makes a post-credits scene work and whether they ever really work. And here to talk about it is NPR's Linda Holmes, host of Pop Culture Happy Hour. Hi, Linda.
LINDA HOLMES, BYLINE: Hello, hello.
RASCOE: Now, please don't spoil it for anyone and not for me 'cause I have not seen "Sinners" yet. But what was your experience with that scene?
HOLMES: Yeah, well, I'm a little bit mixed. I am coming to the point where I think we have too many of these during or after the credit sequences. When I saw "Sinners," the credits started. I saw enough to understand the gist of what seemed to me to be a kind of backdrop to the credits but not really a scene. So I left, and it turned out that I had to be filled in later on a couple of pretty significant plot-related things that happened after that, and I do not care for that. I think if something is really important, it should just be part of the movie. You can still treat it as an epilogue without rolling credits in a way that makes it seem like the movie is over.
RASCOE: What's the thinking behind these scenes, though? Why do people put a scene with the credits or after the credits?
HOLMES: Well, certainly some of it is marketing. For a long time, they used the post-credits scene in each Marvel movie to set up the next Marvel movie and give it, like, a little bit of a tease. That also happens in some of the other big franchises. "The Fast And The Furious" has sometimes done that. The other reason that sometimes comes up is wanting audiences to stick around and watch the credits - right? - in order to appreciate the work of all the people who are part of the movie. That's obviously a very worthy idea.
I'm a little skeptical about whether that works. I think when people do hang around just because they're hoping for a post-credits scene, they're on their phones, they're talking to their friends, they're not necessarily focused on the credits and paying attention to the hundreds of names that might go by. It's hard to force audiences to appreciate all the work that goes into a movie just by getting them to stay for the credits.
RASCOE: Do these credit or post-credit scenes ever really work?
HOLMES: Well, they work best for me when they're just a little bonus. Like, you can hang around or not hang around, but if you do hang around, you might see something extra. For a while, they were doing a bunch of these with outtakes, which can be fun. There have been a few with musical numbers. There's one of those at the end of "Bring It On," which is the cheerleading movie where all the cheerleaders perform to the B*Witched version of the Toni Basil song, "Mickey."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "MICKEY")
B*WITCHED: (Singing) 'Cause when you say you will, it always means you won't. You're giving me the chills, baby, please, baby, don't.
HOLMES: Or probably my favorite example is from "The Avengers," when, at the end of this huge battle, the movie ends, and then after the credits, you briefly see the Avengers, who are exhausted, silently eating shawarma. I've always thought that one was very funny, but again, it's not essential if you don't see it. You didn't miss the final punch of the story.
RASCOE: So like you said, many of these examples here, it's comedies or action movies. Do you think these scenes ever work in movies where there's, like, a more serious subject matter?
HOLMES: Well, with drama, I most often see them with movies based on true stories where they give you something that gives you a little info about the real history. At the end of the movie "Argo," for instance, they show the real people who were involved in the hostage rescue in Iran next to the people who played them in the film. Another example would be "Sing Sing," which is a very good movie that came out last year about the theater program for incarcerated people at Sing Sing Prison. The film tells the story of a real production that they did, and at the end, you get to see some video clips of the performance, and I enjoyed that a lot.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "SING SING")
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Now it seems I am a prisoner. Yes. Now I feel the galling weight of this disgraceful thing (ph).
HOLMES: It's sort of the grainy footage that you would expect from a recording of a real production. And it gives you a sense of how, though the story is serious, the show was funny and odd in a unique way that's kind of hard to fully convey without actually seeing it.
RASCOE: That's Linda Holmes, host of NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour. Thank you so much for talking with us about post-credit scenes.
HOLMES: Thank you so much for having me.
RASCOE: And there's no post-credit scenes here. We're ending it right here.
HOLMES: That's right. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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