Post-credits sequences in movies have been around for decades, and while the Marvel Cinematic Universe has made the practice commonplace among big-budget blockbusters, it’s a long way from the first to do so. Along with the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the Harry Potter movies largely resisted including any post-credits scenes, which was notable even then. Both fantasy epics contained long credits sequences, largely owing to their copious and elaborate special effects, and the producers may have felt that they were too long to expect audiences to sit through.
The lone exception in both franchises is Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, which included a post-credits nod to hapless Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher Gilderoy Lockhart. It generates a laugh like most such scenes are supposed to, but its status as the only cookie in the ten-movies-and-counting Wizarding World says a lot about why the practice works so well.
Post-credit sequences have their roots in the James Bond films. The final credits of From Russia With Love promised viewers that “James Bond will return,” a tradition that continued throughout the series and which the MCU pays homage to in their movies. The technique then picked up steam in the 1980s, starting with 1979’s The Muppet Movie before moving into John Hughes’ high school comedies. For whatever reason, the creative forces behind Harry Potter’s big screen adaptation chose to avoid the technique. To be fair, the films didn’t need the kind of promotion the scenes were used for, and while ultimately hopeful and optimistic stories, they could also be quite serious, particularly in later entries. And that didn’t always make for a good joke or character moment after the credits.
The Chamber of Secrets exception is something different, however. The moment involves Lockhart, a narcissistic phony who actually doesn’t know much magic, but has ridden his undeserved reputation to a string of highly lucrative blockbusters. He turns on Harry and Ron at a key moment in the action and attempts to use a memory-erasing spell to make them forget what they know about him. The spell rebounds, though, and Lockhart soon finds himself with total amnesia. The post-credits sequence then shows the professor’s latest bestseller, entitled “Who Am I?,” at a shop in Diagon Alley.
It’s a funny moment, as well as a reassurance that Lockhart will no longer be a threat. But it also addresses valid concerns from long-time fans about the content of the films. In the course of adaptation, a huge amount of content from the novels had to be cut away. But readers still noted their absence, and the shot of Lockhart in the straitjacket is a nod to the concerns. In the novel Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Harry visits the ward where Lockhart is being kept and finds him as arrogant as ever. The passage does little to move the story forward so it doesn’t appear in the film, but the post-credits sequence from Chamber of Secrets touched on it in a single easy-to-digest image. And in the process, it tacitly acknowledged all of the other similar moments in the novels — some of which were filmed and can be seen in the cut scenes on the Blu-rays and other mediums — which couldn’t make the leap to the big screen.
The movie version of The Chamber of Secrets turns 20 next year, and fans have begun to rediscover the scene, previously lost amid the series’ reputation for a lack of stingers. It serves as a reminder not only of the larger universe beyond the movies themselves — a world the franchise couldn’t possibly flesh out in its entirety — but also the fun of such sequences.
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