The Avengers Mid-Credits Scene Reveals Thanos

What's There

In the mid-credits scene, The Other reports that to challenge the humans is to court death. The camera turns to a figure who has not appeared in the film, and Thanos smiles into the lens.

Why It Matters

Four years earlier the same studio used the post-credits slot to promise a film called The Avengers, and delivered it. This scene makes a considerably larger promise, and the interval before it is kept is longer than most franchises last.

That is what makes it worth an entry rather than a footnote: it is a reference to a film that would not arrive for six years, made to an audience that had no way to evaluate it. Nothing in The Avengers explains who this is. The scene is legible only to comics readers and to anyone willing to wait, and Marvel shipped it anyway — a piece of the film deliberately withheld from most of the people watching.

It also completes a set with the other two MCU entries in this catalog, and the three together map the whole range of what the credits slot can do. Iron Man used it to make a promise. The Avengers shawarma tag used it to release tension and say nothing at all. This one uses it to open a debt. The same slot in the credits, three completely different functions.

The smile is the part that does the work. There is no dialogue for the character and no context, so the entire content of the reveal is an expression — an actor looking at the audience and enjoying knowing something they don't. It is the purest form of the tease: the film is not telling you anything, it is telling you that there is something to be told.

Related entry: the tag scene that established the form this one escalates.

Source: Marvel.com's Phase One MCU guide.