Thanks almost entirely to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, audiences for any major blockbuster franchise have been conditioned to sit through the credits in the hope there’s a hidden treat saved from the end, but things could have gone differently for the superhero saga had Nick Fury literally said anything else when he made his surprise debut in Iron Man.
It’s become the stuff of legend that Samuel L. Jackson was drafted in at short notice to shoot a quick cameo that was kept completely under wraps until the film released in the summer of 2008, and here we are a full decade and a half later with the actor finally set to take billing in an MCU project for the first time ever when Secret Invasion lands on Disney Plus this summer.
However, all talk of the Avengers Initiative almost never happened, after writer Brian Michael Bendis revealed in an interview with Inverse that countless lines were being spitballed right up until Jon Favreau called action, and one of them would have even referenced Jackson’s recent outing in Snakes on a Plane.
Mercifully, Bendis and the rest of the team decided against it, even if he thought it was still a solid shout after admitting his enthusiasm for “get that motherf*cking armor off your motherf*cking… Snakes on a Plane had just come out, so it wasn’t tacky; it was still in the lane of a solid joke.”
It definitely is tacky, and it would have been outdated by the time Iron Man even hit theaters, but it is fascinating to imagine what could have changed in the MCU’s short and long-term future if such a terrible one-liner had made the cut.