Tuesday 6:27 (narrow 14x15)

Timeline Trouble

When covering comic book movies, I said Fox had managed to fit all the X-Men films into a coherent timeline, but that's not quite true.

X-Men has three series, in a sense. The original Patrick Stewart series (a), the McAvoy series (b), and the Wolverine solo series (c). I counted Days of Future Past in both (a) and (b). Chronologically they would go:

X-Men Origins: Wolverine (this overlaps somewhat with First Class through Apocalypse) (c1)

X-Men First Class (b1)

Days of Future Past (past) (b2)

X-Men Apocalypse (b3)

Dark Phoenix (I haven't seen this yet but reviews were bad, so I'll wait for the video) (b4)

X-Men (a1)

X2 - X-Men United (a2)

X-Men - The Last Stand (a3)

The Wolverine (c2)

Days of Future Past (future) (a4)

Logan (c3)

Here's the problem. Assuming "present day" plot, The Wolverine begins in 2013, with Logan haunted by the death of Jean Gray as well as Scott Summers and Charles Xavier from Last Stand, to the point where he's living alone in the woods (although Last Stand is 2006, so he's taking an awfully long time to get over it). Then he's whisked away to Japan for the main plot. The post-credit scene finds him at an airport two years later (2015) (there's a cute tease with an ad for Trask Industries on an airport TV), when suddenly Magneto (presumed powerless) appears accompanied by Xavier (presumed dead). Magneto says "dark forces" are leading to a weapon that will "destroy us all." Fade to black.

Then comes Days of Future Past. The movie starts in "the future, a dark, desolate world." Since the plot involves sending Wolverine back 50 years, we can infer it's 2023. In that future, legions of Sentinels have wiped out most mutants, and the ones that remain are constantly on the run. Many humans have died also, and you see a dump truck unloading heaps of bodies in the opening sequence. But that's not where the last movie left off. Mutants may still be feared at that point, but the whole war and genocide are years away. So how are Xavier and Magneto there to ask for Logan's help in advance like that? When they show up in DoFP they already have a time-travel plan to prevent the war before it starts, but what happened in the intervening 8 years? Even a mutant who could foresee the future doesn't explain the delay. Most of the X-Men would be around in 2015 and they could have done all of that stuff before the Sentinels are killing everyone.

I get it. You probably didn't have the whole next movie worked out when you wrote the post-credit scene (although they only came out a year apart). But Marvel doesn't make that mistake. They had the movies planned out years in advance, and even if scripts weren't all done at the same time they had Feige making sure everything worked. They knew what they were doing with the Avengers, especially with Thor and Captain America. The post-credit scenes in those movies were pointing directly at the team-up. Even without a full script, they knew the Tesseract was going to be the MacGuffin, and Loki was going to be the villain, so those were the only things they referred to.

In the post-credit scene for The Last Stand, Xavier is shown to not truly be dead, and Magneto has not truly lost all his powers. But they needed something more, so they put them in the post-credit scene of The Wolverine, working together, but wrecking the timeline. Not every post-credit scene needs to point so hard the sequel, either. See Guardians of the Galaxy (Vol. 1).

But y'know, it's just a movie.