I am now issuing a *
MAJOR SPOILER WARNING* as this Editorial contains some pretty
critical spoilers for
X-Men: Days of Future Past.
Still here? Well I hope you have seen the film because there are some great moments that I am about to ruin for you if you haven't!
I want to start off by saying that this movie really exceeded my expectations. I bought the X-Men Complete Series Blu-Ray pack and my ticket for the 7:05 showing on opening night to get prepared. I went to the movie and was sitting in the theater with my friend who has never seen an X-Men movie before. We were both blown away. My friend really enjoyed it, until the last 15 minutes, and then he was confused beyond belief. It required another 20 minutes of explanation in the lobby to get my friend to understand the gravity of that last scene.
The last scene of DOFP shows us that Wolverine succeeded in not only changing the future of the X-Men timeline, but has erased an entire fifty years of that timelines history, which has been replaced with new events. While this fifty years worth of "blank canvas" opens up the possibility for countless new stories to be told, and also opens up the possibility to re-tell stories that have been already made (such as the Phoenix Saga), it does this at the expense of rebooting the entire series, except for the evens of
First Class. Here is a very good info graphic posted by KingPatel earlier today that explains this new timeline quite well.
With the release of DOFP, the original timeline goes like this... First Class, Origins, X1, X2, X3, The Wolverine, DOFP, then the timeline ends.
As you can see, other than
First Class and the first five minutes of
Origins, the series may have been completely rebooted after the year 1973. Where does this leave us? Obviously X3 never happened as Jean Gray and Scott Summers are alive, and most of the events of X1, X2, and The Wolverine must have not happened either. Also, when Mystique takes Wolverine while disguised as William Striker at the end of DOFP, the events of Origins are also put into question.
As of right now the new timeline simply goes like this... First Class, DOFP, Apocalypse, 40 - 50 years of rewritten history, then the final scene of DOFP in which all the X-Men, including Scott and Jean, are still alive.
Even though X1, X2, X3, Origins, The Wolverine, and the future parts of DOFP may or may not have ever happened, they still exist as memories in Wolverine's mind and some in the mind of Charles.
In summary, even though there are now two different timelines, all of the films are still cannon. The reason I say all of the films are still cannon is because the old timeline is what leads up to the future portions of DOFP, which then leads to the creation of the new timeline.
Since I still consider all of the films cannon, what order do they need to be watched in if you are showing them to someone who has never seen any of the films before, or if you want to marathon them? This is how I would think you would watch these films in that case.
You would start with First Class as it is the first film in both timelines. Then you watch Origins, X1, X2, and X3 as though the timeline has never been reset because it has never reached the year 2023 in either timeline. You then watch The Wolverine as it leads into DOFP. You then go back and re-watch First Class as the begining of the new timeline, since the years in the new timeline line up with years about 40 years in advance with the old timeline. Finally you watch DOFP as part of the new timeline that happens to intersect with the old timeline (since it ends with the new timeline). You then watch whatever films come next from the studio as they are what come next in the new timeline.
In conclusion I believe that the timeline in movie form goes like this... First Class, Origins, X1 X2, X3, The Wolverine, First Class, DOFP, Apocalypse.
So what do you think of my explanation of the X-Men timeline and my explanation of how to watch them? What do you think of the new timelines? Sound off below.