The single most common feedback I get is about the Anything Extra for movies. The typical email is, “There isn’t anything extra in these credits.” To which, I usually reply, “There is an extra. If you wait until the credits end, you can hear birds chirping, which echoes back to… something in the movie.”
I get it that not everyone agrees on what counts as an extra. But our job here is to report it to everyone. And so we’ve come up with these basic rules that determine if the Anything Extra toggle is clicked.
– The traditional extra scene that hints at what might be involved in the next movie of a series. (This is what most people expect from an extra.)
– Bloopers, interviews, etc.
– Easter eggs of any kind.
– In movies based on true events, photos of the actual people.
– Sound effects outside of the music (it can be REALLY subtle sometimes).
– On-screen text that doesn’t relate to the credits. For instance, what happened later to the real-life people in biography-based films.
Simply put: an extra is anything that isn’t just the standard rolling credits, with the exception that we don’t count Title Credits, which are just the fancy credits that are sometimes reserved for the main cast and crew. Again, exceptions are made if something in the Title Credits adds information or continues the story.
What We Don’t Tell You
We’ll tell you that there are extras. We’ll even tell you approximately when the extra(s) are shown. For instance, about 2 minutes after the credits begin, there’s an extra scene that hints at the sequel. But what we won’t tell you is what happens. You’ll never see anything extra that reads: *Deadpool travels back in time and kills Ryan Reynolds before he finishes the script for ‘Green Lantern’.*
We’ll go as far as to say, “There’s an audio-extra that lasts for 2 seconds.” But we’re not going to get into the weeds.
A History of Extras
Originally, and rather naively, I would label a movie as having extras if there was an extra scene. (Duh.) But then, there was this one movie—I forget what it was, but it was based on a comic—and at the end of the credits, there was an odd sound. I made nothing of it. No extras in this movie. My work is done.
But then the emails. A bunch of them, that basically said, “If you read the comics, then you would know that this is the sound of such-and-such and means that so-and-so will be the villain in the sequel.”
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That’s where I started to rethink things. I can’t be expected to know the lore associated with every movie I watch, and so there’s a lot that will get past me. This is when I decided that non-video extras would count. This is how we’ve arrived at where we are today.
You have no idea how thrilled I am when the extras are just an obvious extra scene. (Thank you to those directors/editors who don’t make my life more complicated than it needs to be.) And then, there are extras like what we have in Project Hail Mary, which undoubtedly counts as an extra, but it’s only a two-second sound. Really? They could have thrown in a tiny bit of video so it would be obvious. But no, this director wants to make my job harder than it needs to be. So here I am, writing this post. And here you are, reading all this, *extra stuff*, just because the world is an imperfect place. 🙂
Anything Extra? (Click to find out)
For years, the RunPee app displayed a graphic that had either a green-checkmark-icon, for there are extras or a red-bang-icon, for there aren’t any extras. And then a message: Click to read more.
The problem is that people would only see the icon and go off of that. They would get to the end of the credits, there wouldn’t be the extra that they expected, and then I got an email. And I respond to all emails, so more work for me. Yay!
But I fixed it. Now, you can’t learn if there is or isn’t anything extra without clicking on the button. And once you click on the button, you can see a little more detail to help you decide if this extra is *extra enough* for you to stick around.
Creator and developer of the RunPee app. When something doesn’t work right in the app it’s pretty much his fault. 🙂
Aspiring author. Would like to finish his “Zombie Revelations” trilogy if he could break away for working on RunPee and the cottage he’s building for RunPee Mom.