The mid-credit scene of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings brought Marvel’s newest cinematic hero fully into the MCU by bringing in some familiar faces from the Avengers team, but just who those faces belonged to was something that was never set in stone and appears to have been a constantly moving beast according to director Destin Daniel Cretton. While the scene in question is now quite well documented, there are spoilers in the rest of this article, so proceed with the usual caution if you have managed to avoid all talk of what the scene contains.
In the mid-credit scene of Shang-Chi, we see Wong bringing the title hero and Katy into contact with a human-again Bruce Banner and Captain Marvel, who appear in holographic form to discuss the Ten Rings and how they appear to sending a signal out into the universe, calling something from the dark. While this sets up a future threat to the MCU, and all seems pretty straightforward, Cretton told Yahoo! Entertainment that things were not quite a simple as they seem, mostly because of the number of plates Marvel are spinning that need to be considered when creating such a scene.
He said, “You would think that more things came straight down from the top, but that never was [ordered down]. We were begging sometimes to like, ‘Just tell us [who can be in the scene]. But it took a lot of us throwing out options, like, ‘How about this, how about this, how about this?’ And I think because the [Marvel Cinematic Universe] is such a living organism…you know, there’s writer’s rooms happening, developing things simultaneously all the time. Everything does need to fit.”
He went on to explain that with many future Marvel stories already being in production, he and screenwriters would go through ideas of who might fit in the scene, and when putting those ideas to the higher powers they would get “a maybe.” He continued, “And that meant, ‘Okay, something else is developing somewhere else, but we’re not totally sure if that character will make sense.’ Sometimes that ‘maybe’ would hang for a bit, and then they’d [Marvel Studios] say, ‘Oh, no, we can’t do that person anymore.’ We did that, I don’t know [how many times].”
Cretton concluded, “We went through so many iterations who could be in that room. We knew that we wanted characters to be helping us usher Shang-Chi into the bigger universe. But those characters that we landed on made sense to all of the other things that are happening in the MCU at the time that we actually shot it.”
Of course, the use of Banner in the final version raised a number of other questions from fans, especially as the last time we saw the scientist he had come to a compromise with his angry alter ego to create the Smart Hulk and seemed to be quite happy with the combined personality. There’s a theory that this will be explained in She-Hulk. When asked if this was something important, Cretton would only tease, “All will be disclosed very soon.”
Mark Ruffalo is set to appear alongside Tatiana Maslany in the She-Hulk series next year, so it seems like we will be seeing the different sides of Banner’s personality again in that series. Meanwhile, Brie Larson will reprise her Captain Marvel role for The Marvels, which arrives in cinemas November 2022, but it would not be too much of a surprise to see her cameo in the Ms. Marvel series on Disney+ that precedes it.
Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings will arrive to start streaming on Disney+ November 12th, and will be available in physical formats from November 30th. This news comes to us from Yahoo Entertainment.