Warning: Spoilers for The Lost City are in play below! Be sure to head over to one of our other fabulous articles if you haven’t watched the adventurous comedy yet!
If you love an action-filled comedy that also has some noticeable hints of romance, you are in luck, because the 2022 movie releases have now gifted fans with The Lost City. The Sandra Bullock, Channing Tatum, and Daniel Radcliffe-filled movie, which won the box office on opening weekend, also features a notable non-cameo performance from Brad Pitt, and the movie’s directors have just revealed how they convinced Pitt to stick around for that mid-credits scene.
How Did The Lost City’s Directors Get Brad Pitt Into That Mid-Credits Scene?
In The Lost City, which has won the approval of several critics, Sandra Bullock stars as public appearance-averse romance novelist Loretta Sage, whose latest book featuring her long-time cover model, Alan (Channing Tatum), puts her in the path of bratty billionaire Fairfax (Daniel Radcliffe), who’s looking for a legendary lost fortune and kidnaps Loretta to make her find the treasure for him. When Alan goes looking for her, he enlists the help of the uber-skilled Jack, played by a delightful Brad Pitt. Jack then, very surprisingly, shows up in a mid-credits scene, and co-directors Adam and Aaron Nee spoke to Entertainment Weekly about getting Pitt to do that extra scene, with Adam Nee saying:
Once we knew we had Brad in the film, we were like, ’We are going to soak up every minute of this guy’s time. We’re going to make him hate saying yes to this movie. So we slipped him these pages, and we’re like, ‘We wrote a scene where you’re alive at the end,’ and he’s like, ‘Okay, this is crazy.’ But he was so game.
And, “crazy” is a great word for that scene. As you probably recall, while Jack was doing a tremendous job of rescuing the uncomfortable jumpsuit-clad Loretta (and giving Alan lots of already-unconscious men to slap to the ground so he could feel useful), after they all get back to his tiny jungle car, things go shockingly wrong. As Jack is cutting Loretta loose from her zip ties, he’s shot in the head by one of the Fairfax henchmen, covering poor, horrified Alan in some of his brain matter.
Loretta and Alan manage to eventually survive and get out of Fairfax’s grasp. But, the mid-credits scene features the now-couple (who survived a leech-based encounter with Alan’s naked butt) at a group meditation class, where Jack, remarkably, shows up behind them, scaring the hell out of Alan, in particular. Apparently, Jack is so skilled that he was able to switch to using “a different 10 percent” of his brain, and is now just trying to cope with the leftover resentment at having been shot and then left for dead on the jungle floor.
For the super soldier-like enigma that is Jack, it’s the perfect kind of ending for his character, and, as Adam Nee said, it helped to give the audience even more fun times with Brad Pitt, who had already truly made the most of his small role in The Lost City.