The Marvels post-credits scene, explained

A lot is riding on The Marvels.

Arriving as Marvel’s decidedly up (Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3., Loki) and down (Secret Invasion, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, that instantly-infamous Variety cover story) year continues, the sequel to the Brie Larson-fronted Captain Marvel assembles a new team of heroes in the form of Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) and Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani) alongside Larson’s Carol Danvers as they team up to face an intergalactic threat in the form of Kree extremist Dar-Benn (Zawe Ashton).

Major, major spoiler alert below. You’ve been warned.

Only Dar-Benn isn’t the real threat. The Marvels features the first on-screen appearance of an incursion event — a long-teased multiversal calamity that will play a critical part in the future of the MCU and its Multiverse Saga moving forward.

But that’s not all: The Marvels‘ post-credits sequence deploys a pretty wild cameo to foreshadow what’s next for the MCU.

To help you understand it all, let’s walk through the lore, the key players involved, and what it means for the future of the MCU.

What happens in The Marvels‘ post-credits scene?

Monica wakes up and meets a version of her mother, Maria (Lashana Lynch). You may remember Maria from Captain Marvel. Later, during the Wandavision TV series, we found out that she died of cancer sometime after The Snap, which meant Monica (one of many MCU characters who got temporarily Snapped out of existence) wasn’t around to say goodbye to her. So this isn’t the Maria we know.

As Monica rightly begins to freak out, this version of Maria (going by the name Binary, with a costume to match) makes it clear she has no idea who Monica is — and then Beast walks in the door.

Yes, Beast — as played by Kelsey Grammer, most recently in 2014’s X-Men: Days of Future Past. That film’s comparatively lavish Beast makeup effects have been replaced here by some spotty CGI, but this version of Beast (lab coat, glasses, no shirt) looks enough like the X-Men: The Animated Series version of the character to fire all those ’90s nostalgia pleasure centers.

It’s unclear whether or not this is supposed to be the same Beast audiences last saw in Days of Future Past. However, the production design of the room in the background is strikingly similar to the blue-gray-toned look and feel of the Fox X-Men franchise, which is seemingly confirmed to be part of MCU canon for the first time.

Sure, there’s a chance this could be a Beast variant a la Patrick Stewart’s cameo in the second Doctor Strange movie, where Stewart played a multiversal replicant of his beloved Charles Xavier from the Fox X-Men movies — not the big-brained professor himself.

Nevertheless, our money’s on Marvel using the Marvels‘ post-credit scene to tee up the inter-franchise crossover to come, with an introduction for Fox’s X-Men being on the docket since Disney acquired movie studio 21st Century Fox in 2017.

What’s an incursion?

The first mention of an incursion in the MCU came in the midst of an exposition dump by John Krasinski’s Reed Richards in 2022’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. An incursion event occurs “when the boundary between two universes erodes, they collide… destroying one, or both, entirely.”