The following post contains SPOILERS for Eternals.

The arrival of Eternals on Disney+ has fans speculating once again — or maybe for the first time, since a lot of Marvel fans skipped Eternals in theaters — about the movie’s enigmatic post-credits scene. (Not to be confused with the film’s similarly confusing mid-credits scene, which introduces Harry Styles’ Eros and Patton Oswalt’s Pip the troll.)

In the final post-credits scene, Kit Harington’s Dane Whitman, who has spent most of the movie acting like a mild-mannered English dude, stands alone in an office with a mysterious case. He opens it, revealing a sword wrapped in bloody bandages. Unintelligible whispers fill the soundtrack, as if some kind of ancient power or presence is calling out to Dane. An inscription carved into the inside of the case reads “Mors mihi lucrum” — death is my reward. Sounds like a totally normal and chill sword!

Dane paces around the room, then goes to touch the sword, which releases tiny little waves of power that seem to reach out to him in return. Just as he’s about to grab the blade, a voice calls out to him from off-camera: “Sure you’re ready for that, Mr. Whitman?” Dane turns to see who it is and there’s a sudden cut to black and the words “Eternals will return…” (Not the Eternals, just Eternals. They’re like the band Eagles. Don’t ever call them The Eagles, because that’s not their name. They’re just Eagles.)

The voice speaking to Dane Whitman is uncredited in the film, and it’s such a brief appearance that the first audiences to see Eternals weren’t entirely sure who it even was. On Disney+, the subtitles only refer to the voice as “Mysterious Man.” But we now know that it belongs to Mahershala Ali, who has been announced as the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Blade the Vampire Hunter.

The Dane Whitman of Marvel Comics — who’s also known as the superhero the Black Knight — doesn’t have a ton of history with Blade. But generally when a character shows up in a Marvel post-credits scene, they’re not just there for a gratuitous cameo; the appearance is meant to set up future appearances, establish connections between heroes, and often to tease future team-ups. And that has got fans wondering where Blade and Black Knight will show up next.

A lot of speculation is focused around the MCU’s Blade starting a group of supernatural heroes called the Midnight Suns. First introduced in the 1990s, the original comic book Midnight Suns were a loose collection of heroes including Ghost Rider, Johnny Blaze (the original Ghost Rider at a time when he’d been freed of his skeleton-headed curse), Morbius (the vampire played by Jared Leto in his upcoming solo film), the Darkhold Redeemers (various magic-inclined heroes who defended the Darkhold, an all-powerful occult book that was seen in the possession of Wanda at the end of WandaVision), and a group of vampire hunters that included Blade called the Nightstalkers.

There’s also a video game in the works called Marvel’s Midnight Suns that features Blade and Ghost Rider, alongside other Marvel heroes like Wolverine, Iron Man, Captain America, and Captain Marvel. So it seems entirely feasible that Marvel could be setting the groundwork for some kind of Midnight Suns movie or Disney+ series that would feature Blade, Black Knight, Doctor Strange, Ghost Rider, and perhaps a few other characters like Wanda Maximoff.

It could be quite a while until we know Blade’s motives for sure. While Marvel is working on a solo Blade movie for Mahershala Ali, it’s yet to receive an official release date. Despite what that final title card promised, Eternals 2 hasn’t been officially announced yet either. The next Marvel Cinematic Universe movie is Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and it also features Wanda Maximoff, so it could provide us the next clues about where all this magic sword stuff is headed. That film is currently scheduled to open in theaters on May 6, 2022.

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