For years, comic book movies have played fast and loose with the source material. Until Marvel Studios homogenized its decades of lore to create palatable versions of its superhero pantheon with the Marvel Cinematic Universe, most film adaptations cherry-picked details to cobble together a close proximity of what fans were familiar with. Not all of these page-to-screen shifts appeased fans, but they were more often than not close enough to what they loved to lure them into theaters. The biggest splash, which spearheaded the onslaught of comic book movies we’ve seen for nearly two decades, was 2000's X-Men.

Despite the massive popularity of Marvel's X-Men comics in the 1980s and early ‘90s, many fans never dreamed of seeing their favorite band of altruistic mutants on the big screen. The X-Men mythos is dense and winding; their stories are filled with interstellar adventures, time travel, aliens and heavy social commentary. The notion of distilling those elements, not to mention an enormous cast of characters, into a two-hour film never should have worked. But, here was are, 18 years and nearly a dozen films later, and the X-Men have been a staple of Hollywood for a generation. And while most modern cinematic universes, most notably the MCU, have gone to great lengths to forge connective tissue between entries, to make them feel like one sweeping story, the X-Men films throw caution to the wind, for better or worse.

Gonna Go Back in Time

X-Men: First Class

The first three X-Men films, released between 2000 and 2006, more or less act as a solid trilogy, with a through line that ultimately makes sense. Time moves at a reasonable pace, and plot beats set up in one film find resolution in later entries, even if some of those arcs are painfully dumb. The first two films in particular are solid when watched back to back in a vacuum. What was great about the first film, X-Men, was expanded upon in X2: X-Men United (yes, it's a silly title). Things begin to get a bit shaky in the third chapter, X-Men: The Last Stand, however.

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It’s easy to chalk that up to the film being produced by a new creative team, and it does lose a lot of the franchise’s tone and aesthetic, but The Last Stand crams too much story and way too many characters. And as if the movie were rebelling against its predecessors, it kills off three of the main characters, which led to the franchise painting itself into a corner. So how does a series bounce back from that? Easy: prequels.

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Instead of moving forward across a burned bridge, the X-Men films decided to rewind the clock with a pair of back-to-back prequels. The first focused on our favorite clawed, Canadian bad boy, Wolverine, and should have been a home run after the lackluster reception of The Last Stand, but somehow it was worse. Way worse. X-Men Origins: Wolverine not only swept the superlative of worst X-Men film title away from X2, it's arguably the worst entry in the entire franchise. Thankfully, with the benevolent tutelage of director Matthew Vaughn, 2011's X-Men: First Class appeared to put the franchise back on track, even if it the train was rolling in reverse. The new cast, playing largely familiar roles, was welcomed by fans, and the film acted a soft reboot of sorts, but this is where things get really wonky.

We Don’t Need No Stinking Continuity

Kitty Pryde in X-Men Days of Future Past with Wolverine

X-Men: First Class reset the clock on the franchise, and did so pretty well. But instead of just glomming onto this version of the X-Men and steadily moving their narrative forward, Fox had a different plan, and gave Wolverine a second solo film that acknowledges the events of the original trilogy. Now, most comic fans would have been fine with this, if First Class and the aptly titled The Wolverine operated in their own separate continuities. We have been trained to accept recons and revamps of long-running series; we can roll with the punches. Instead of creating a diverging property, The Wolverine included a post-credits scene designed to bridge the gap between the two timelines. Now, this didn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing. Thus far, if you were to squint hard enough, the X-Men movie continuity made enough sense to get a pass. The follow-up movie, 2014's X-Men: Days of Future Past (arguably the best in the series), tried its damnedest to put a pair of bifocals on fans so they could see the bigger picture. And it almost worked -- almost.

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Days of Future Past is a time-travel story, which gives it a lot of leeway in messing with the time line and fixing issues of the past. By traveling to the 1970s to revisit the cast of First Class and showing us a stark version of the future that would occur post-The Last Stand and The Wolverine, director Bryan Singer and screenwriter Simon Kinberg were able to expunge the moments from previous films that didn't jibe with the overarching X-Men narrative. The film essentially erased The Last Stand and X-Men: Origins from continuity, effectively rendering them superfluous (with the exception of the death of Jean Grey, which Wolverine just can't get over, even though he's totally hooking up with Storm in the future, so...). With the reset button hit, the franchise decided to keep moving forward, a bit too quickly.

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Slow It Down

Psylocke in X-Men: Apocalypse

The biggest issue in regard to continuity in the X-Men franchise stems from the characters' ages in the movies. There are two facets to this problem, the first being the number of duplicate mutants populating the films. We see a glimpse of Psylocke as a teenager in Last Stand, which presumably takes place in the early 21st century, but she plays a larger role in X-Men: Apocalypse which is set in 1983. Other characters, like Warren Worthington III, Emma Frost and Cyclops, suffer similar disparate existences within the timeline. Even if some of the films are null and void, the events that occur within them still had some effect on the films that are canonical.

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The other prong to this issue is how characters age. The last three X-Men films (not including the Deadpool films or Logan, which are entirely different cans of worms) took place in different decades. Between the events of First Class and Apocalypse, 20 years elapsed. Now, one could argue that the younger versions first seen in the later films are now more age-appropriate in the former (again, if you squint really hard), but with the upcoming release of Dark Phoenix, which takes place in 1992, the franchise wants us to believe that Michael Fassbender is eight years away from looking like Ian McKellen (no disrespect intended). Other characters also have a similar issue in appearance from canonical standpoint. Do we even have to go down the rabbit hole of how ridiculously huge Hugh Jackman is in the films that take place before the original X-Men?

It's almost impressive how brazen the X-Men movies are in regard to ignoring their own legacy. After trying to course correct, the filmmakers have double-downed on the fractured time line, choosing to ignore certain aspects of the series while embracing others. Honestly, it's one of the most comic book-y moves a studio can take on a property this big. With the X-Men finding a new home at Marvel Studios, we're hoping to see some sort of cohesion, but the zaniness of what Fox has given fans and the connect-the-dots continuity has been a lot of fun to witness unfold.


Written and directed by Simon Kinberg, Dark Phoenix stars James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Nicholas Hoult, Sophie Turner, Tye Sheridan, Alexandra Shipp, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Evan Peters and Jessica Chastain. The film opens Feb. 14, 2019.