According to Empire magazine, the upcoming Amazing Spider-Man 2 has a post-credits stinger for X-Men: Days of Future Past, which means we’re entering a brave new world of cross-studio superhero collaboration. Where’s Teddy Roosevelt when you need him?
Now this isn’t a post-credits sting as we’ve seen before in the Marvel universe, setting up some sort of crossover between the two worlds. Rather, it’s a clip from the X-film that gives us a taste of the action we’re in for. We’ve been told by Sony that the clip will be attached to the film in the UK. [Empire]
If you don’t know the background on this, The Avengers, Spider-Man, and The X-Men are all based on Marvel comics (information I beat out of a nerd one day), but while The Avengers and various SHIELD spinoffs are being produced by Marvel (now a subsidiary of Disney), Spider-Man is currently licensed to Sony, while Fox has X-Men. Fox and Sony are desperate to copy what Disney/Marvel has done with the Avengers universe (all in the name of that sweet ancillary revenue), but up until now, it was assumed that they’d all be doing it separately. Since, you know, competitors are often known to compete with one other.
Either Fox and Sony have cut some sweetheart deal to make this happen, or this is just the natural evolution of movie advertising, where the trailers used to come before the movie, but now Fox is pioneering this new practice, probably paying a premium to stick it after the movie. That’s the general trend of advertising, to constantly infiltrate places where it’s not instantly recognizable as “advertising.”
In any case, I can’t imagine anyone will have strong opinions about this.
Here’s a very slightly spoilery description of the scene:
The scene featured sees Jennifer Lawrence’s Mystique, Lucas Till’s Havok and Evan Jonigkeit’s Toad taking on William Stryker (Josh Helman) and his military men. Without wishing to spoil anything, let’s just say that Mystique once again demonstrates her formidable fighting skills in the brief segment.
Amazing Spider-Man 2 opens May 2nd in the US, and hits today in the UK.