Avengers: Infinity War’s post-credits scene, explained

This post contains spoilers for Avengers: Infinity War. Do not read any further if you don’t want to be spoiled. Proceed at your own risk.

Avengers: Infinity War has one post-credits scene, and it’s huge — a teaser that sets the table for the future of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Over the past several years, mid- and post-credits scenes have become a Marvel tradition, something fans look forward to every time the studio puts out a new release. Sometimes they contain huge reveals that hint at future movies (see: Thanos intercepting Thor’s Asgardian spaceship at the end of Thor: Ragnarok, which sets up the starting point of Infinity War).

Other times, they serve as little winks from Marvel to its biggest fans, or callback to the company’s history (see: Howard the Duck dropping by at the end of the first Guardians of the Galaxy, or Captain America musing on the virtue of patience at the end of Spider-Man: Homecoming as if to imply that post-credits scenes won’t always feature big reveals).

In recent years, Marvel has increasingly wrapped its movies with two end credits scenes, one mid-credits and one post-credits. But Infinity War just has the one at the very end of the credits, and it’s a doozy. Here’s what happens:

Spoiler warning: There’s major discussion about what happens in Avengers: Infinity War in the next section. This is your last chance.

What happens: At the end of Infinity War, Thanos’s plan comes to fruition. In those closing minutes, we watch Avengers vaporizing into nothing and the survivors realizing that Thanos has indeed eliminated half of the universe’s inhabitants. In the post-credits scene, Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury and Cobie Smulders’s Maria Hill (whom we haven’t seen since Age of Ultron) are alerted of the attack on Wakanda while driving. While they’re gathering information, a car swerves and crashes in front of theirs, and they realize no one is driving it. Seconds later, Hill is vaporized, to Nick Fury’s horror.

The audience, having seen what happened in Wakanda, knows that this is the effect of Thanos eliminating half of humanity — but Fury doesn’t know that. As he, too, begins to vaporize into nothingness, he manages to fire off one last message on a communications device, which the camera zooms in on it as it sends. A star-shaped logo appears as confirmation that his message was received.

What it means: The big reveal here isn’t Hill and Fury getting turned into dust — though that’s no doubt big, since we haven’t seen these two characters in the MCU recently. No, the real story here is whom Nick Fury is sending the message to: Carol Danvers, a.k.a. Captain Marvel:

The star-shaped logo with the stripes on Fury’s device corresponds to the star-shaped logo and stripes on Captain Marvel’s uniform (above). That’s actually part of a 2012 uniform redesign, which was part of bigger overhaul of the character that turned Ms. Marvel into Captain Marvel (a title that has been held previously by other characters).

In the comic books, she’s one of the Avengers’ leaders and one of the more powerful superheroes on the team. She can fly and fire photon beams, she has superhuman strength, and in some stories, she’s turned into a more powerful being known as Binary. If there’s someone you need to help save the universe, Carol would be a great bet. Fury knows this.

Though Danvers has a potent and vocal fan base (called the “Carol Corps”), she hasn’t yet been featured in a Marvel film. This changes on March 6, 2019, when Captain Marvel, starring Brie Larson as Danvers, is scheduled to hit theaters.

But that doesn’t mean we’ll see Danvers help save the Avengers, Hill, and Fury from their fate in that film; Captain Marvel is set in the 1990s, way before the events of Infinity War. This scene — paired with the onscreen text that follows the Marvel Studios logo, promising “Thanos will return” — is more likely pointing to next year’s still-untitled Avengers 4, which will presumably bring in Captain Marvel to address the fallout of Thanos’s destruction.