If you haven’t seen X-Men: Days of Future Past, spoilers follow…
So, 20th Century Fox made great strides in trying to fix some of the continuity issues with its X-Men franchise this year with the release of X-Men: Days of Future Past, with director Bryan Singer and writer-producer Simon Kinberg managing to find a way of bringing characters like Cyclops and Jean Grey back from the dead without having to reboot the franchise. But it seems they’re looking at going one step further, with Kinberg telling MTV that the new timeline could even see characters having been born earlier.
“We sort of reset the clock on Days Of Future Past. And so a lot could have changed from that point in 1973 forward. Meaning, people could have been born earlier. The whole world changed after those events. So things that were represented in X1, X2 and X3 wouldn’t have happened in quite the same way.”
This seems like a way of bringing in younger versions of the likes of Cyclops, Jean, Nightcrawler and Storm alongside the X-Men: First Class cast for X-Men: Apocalypse and subsequent sequels without having to commit to a full-on reboot. Which is all well and good, had X-Men: Days of Future Past not ended with a scene showing those characters at the exact same age they would have been had the events of X1, X2 and X3 still happened. Furthermore, it also raises the question about the upcoming Wolverine sequel, and whether it will completely ignore the events of The Wolverine, or take place in a timeline that is no longer relevant to the main franchise…
So, I guess the continuity issues aren’t going away any time soon.
Originally published July 29, 2014. Updated November 29, 2022.
