Marvel's biggest post-credits teases that still haven't paid off: Harry Styles to Charlize Theron's Clea

There was a time when a Marvel post-credits scene was basically a contract. You sat through eleven minutes of names scrolling past a black screen, and Marvel handed you a receipt: here's what's coming next, here's who's showing up, here's the plan. Nick Fury shows up in an Iron Man tag scene and eighteen months later there's an Avengers movie. That was the deal.

Since Avengers: Endgame, Marvel appears to have lost the receipt. The studio kept doing the ritual, stinger after stinger, cameo after cameo, but stopped doing the follow-through. However, the promise is now closer to a fortune cookie: vague, a little exciting in the moment, and almost never checked back on. Here's a tour of the MCU's most expensive shrugs.

The gold standard of 'why did we bother.' At the end of 2021's Eternals, three of Chloé Zhao's ancient aliens are drifting through space when Pip the Troll (voiced by Patton Oswalt) beams in to announce the arrival of Eros, Thanos's little brother, also known as Starfox, played by a pop star in gold booties. The scene set up Eros as a hero with deep comic-book ties to both the Eternals and the Avengers, and closed with the promise that "the Eternals will return."

They have not returned. Post-Endgame, that once-sacred post-credits contract has frayed badly, and Eternals is where the rot arguably started, Marvel used the scene to launch two brand-new characters, Eros and Kit Harington's sword-wielding Dane Whitman, without any real plan for when they'd come back. Eros was introduced as a rescue-mission setup, warning the surviving Eternals that their friends had been captured, a cliffhanger that, nearly four years on, nobody has bothered to resolve, though a few Eternals have at least resurfaced in animated form on What If...? Styles did technically reappear in Marvel's orbit again in 2024's Kraven the Hunter — as a song on the soundtrack, not a character. Twice wasted in three years is a personal record even by MCU standards.

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness closed with Strange getting cornered on a New York street by a woman in purple. She tells him his multiverse-hopping has caused an 'incursion', a universe-ending event — and asks him to help fix it before she slices open a portal to the Dark Dimension and pulls him through. Screenwriter Michael Waldron later confirmed she was Clea, the niece of Dormammu and, in the comics, one of Strange's great loves and equals as a sorcerer.

That was May 2022. Strange has not been seen since, and neither has Clea, outside of Theron's Instagram, anyway. But unlike Eros, this one might not be dead: reports suggest Avengers: Doomsday will finally cash the check, with Clea reportedly appearing as one of Doctor Doom's followers. That would make Clea the rarest thing in the modern MCU, a tease that actually gets paid off, just three years and one franchise-realigning crossover event later than advertised.

The Ms. Marvel finale in 2022 dropped two grenades back-to-back. First, in the show proper: Kamala's friend Bruno runs tests on her genetics and discovers she has a specific mutation setting her apart, unlocking her powers through the Noor rather than through the bangle alone. Then, in the actual post-credits scene, Kamala's bangle starts glowing strangely while she's resting, and she vanishes in a ripple of energy, replaced by someone else entirely. That someone else was Carol Danvers, which at least got a payoff, of sorts, in The Marvels a year later. The 'is Kamala secretly a mutant, and does that mean the X-Men are finally coming" thread, on the other hand, has been left to compost. Marvel confirmed she has the X-gene, dangled the biggest word in Marvel history, mutant — in front of a fanbase that's been waiting a decade for it, and then never mentioned it again.

Give credit where it's due: One thread didn't rot. Black Widow's 2021 post-credits scene showed Yelena Belova visiting Natasha's grave, only for Julia Louis-Dreyfus's Contessa Valentina Allegra de Fontaine to show up and hand her a new assignment, kill Hawkeye. Val had already recruited John Walker as her personal US Agent by the end of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, building out a roster of morally compromised misfits with nowhere else to go. The slow-burn recruitment drive across three separate projects eventually became the backbone of Thunderbolts* (2025), which finally assembled Val's ragtag crew into something resembling a team. It's proof the model used to work, a scattered set of stingers actually adding up to something, which almost makes the pile of ones that never did sting more.

Line them all up and the shape is obvious: Marvel spent Phase Four treating the post-credits scene more like a vending machine. Harry Styles as Thanos's brother. A new sorcerer for Doctor Strange. A mutant reveal for the MCU's first South Asian superhero. Nick Fury's stinger used to guarantee a movie. These stingers increasingly guarantee nothing except a Reddit thread and a 'Marvel confirms X will return' headline that ages like milk.

To be fair, the universe is enormous now, actors' schedules are a nightmare, and not every dangling thread needs an immediate bow — some of this, like Clea, might genuinely be biding its time for Avengers: Doomsday and Secret Wars to pull everything back together. But until that actually happens on screen, the smart move as a viewer is to stop treating the last thirty seconds after the credits as a promise. Treat it as what it's become: a very expensive teaser trailer for a movie that may or may not exist.