By the end of the week, it's possible that X-Men: Days of Future Past will finally eradicate the mistakes of X-Men: The Last Stand, thanks to the time-travel plot of the upcoming sequel — or "inbetweequel," as director Bryan Singer has called it.

For his part, Simon Kinberg, writer and producer on Days of Future Past, and one of two credited writers on The Last Stand, sees the upcoming X-Men movie as an opportunity to fix what went wrong in Brett Ratner's 2006 film.

"I wanted the Dark Phoenix story, but I regret where the movie ended up," he told Screen Crush. "And so, weirdly, this was sort of my opportunity, a little like the characters in Days of Future Past going back and improving their younger selves with the lessons they've learned as wiser men. It's sort of a chance for me to go back and do differently what I did 10 years ago on X3."

As a result, Days of Future Past sets out to correct the continuity of the X-Men movies, without ignoring what came before — including The Last Stand, for better or for worse.

"It was absolutely a conscious thing that what we were doing was trying to set the continuity into a more coherent place," he said. "And that we would erase certain inconsistencies. And no matter what, we knew we were making a time travel movie that whatever happened in the past was going to ripple and have a butterfly effect on the future and obviously touch X1, X2, and X3. As we were doing it, we were very careful and had a lot of long conversations — Bryan and I — about how much we want to redefine the world of X1, X2, and X3."

We'll see the new definitions of those worlds when Days of Future Past arrives on Friday.