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Warning: The following article contains spoilers for Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom. Please proceed with caution.
The adventures of DC’s King of Atlantis continue, then abruptly stop forever, in Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom. It’s been a long, wet road, but the good times couldn’t last forever.
That said, could they last for a little bit longer? Just for a few more seconds, at the tail end of the movie, as a special treat for being good and sitting through the credits and finding out who Amber Heard’s hair wrangler was?
Does Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom have a post-credits scene, and what future DCEU stories might it set up? The news, unlike reviews for the movie itself, isn’t totally bad.
Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom: Post-credits scene or nah?
Alright, fish heads. (Is that what Aquaman fans call themselves? Are there enough Aquaman fans that they need a name for the fandom? There must be, right? The last movie made a billion dollars. We’re getting off track.) Yes, Aquaman 2 has a post-credits scene? There’s a more interesting question to ask, though: Why does Aquaman 2 have a post-credits scene?
In the scene in question, Orm, AKA Ocean Master ⏤ Arthur Curry’s half-brother and unlikely buddy cop in the film ⏤ puts a bug on a burger. Then he eats the burger. With this golden-age-of-Nickelodeon moment of gross-out payoff from a very silly setup earlier in the film, the movie ends.
More than that, though, the franchise ends. The entire DCEU, from the Codex 2013’s Man of Steel to the godless CGI from 2023’s The Flash to this, the shared universe’s final entry, concludes ⏤ not with a bang, but with the guy from that Gerard Butler Phantom of the Opera movie eating a hamburger with ucky, yucky bugs on it. Remember 11 years ago, at the end of Avengers, when the post-credits scene did a sendup of self-important, hyper-dramatic post-credits scenes by having the team awkwardly eat meat wraps in silence while people cleaned up behind them? This is sort of like that, only unintentional, and with a bug, and more than a decade late, and also it’s the cap on a $6 billion roller coaster of a franchise.
In conclusion, maybe movies are just bad now. Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom hits theaters Dec. 22.