Movie Series with the Biggest Continuity Problems
Just because a movie franchise has lasted for years and consists of multiple instalments, that's no guarantee that everything has gone smoothly along the way. Sometimes even one of the most important elements to a franchise, the continuity between films, can go astray. This, of course, leads to a lot of confusion regarding what's canon and what isn't. This list compiles the movie series that seem to have suffered the most where continuity problems are concerned.
Okay, here's the timeline more or less explained:
X-Men, X2: X-Men United, and X-Men: The Last Stand constituted the original franchise, with two Wolverine spin-offs that we're still trying to forget. There is a prequel, X-Men: First Class, and its sequel, X-Men: Days of Future Past, which, thanks to some time travel, managed to erase pretty much everything that happened in X2 and X-Men: The Last Stand.
X-Men: First Class and some of the Wolverine content still exist, along with Deadpool 1 and 2. However, all this time travel mumbo jumbo messed everything up so badly that several alternate realities appeared, specifically X-Men: Apocalypse and Logan. Dark Phoenix is set 10 years after X-Men: Apocalypse, and to be honest, I have no clue what timeline The New Mutants or Gambit will be in.
Despite all these continuity issues, it's been a pleasure to get hopelessly lost in spacetime with our favorite mutants.
It's not so much that the series has failed at maintaining a solid continuity. It's more that the series keeps wiping the slate clean and starting over.
1 and 2 felt like a complete story, but when 3 confused audiences by attempting to turn the franchise into an anthology series and failed, it jumped back into the Michael Myers storyline and gave us an overly complicated story arc in 4, 5, and 6. Then, it wiped those last three films out and made 7 and 8 the direct successors to 1 and 2.
Then we got a prequel/remake of 1, and that film got a sequel that concluded the story. Now, we have an 11th film that pretends the remake series never happened, returns us to the original series, and (while retconning 2 for the first time in the series) makes itself yet another direct sequel to the original. Whew, that's a lot.
I blame Alien 3.
I never shy away from the fact that I hate that movie, and everything bad about this franchise seemed to stem from that ugly, brown, hateful stain of a third installment. It doomed Alien: Resurrection before it was even made and led to the series' decline in popularity.
That's probably what fueled Fox to make the desperate-for-money AVP movies, which have both been rendered non-canon with the release of the two more recent prequel films.
Let's be real here, has anyone liked a James Cameron film since Titanic? Everyone thought Genisys was going to be a "return to form" just because it had the Terminator 2 theme placed into every single scene, but instead, we got something on the level of T3 if it was made by the guys who came up with T Salvation.
Just give us a cheap direct-to-DVD knockoff of the original. It would probably be better than anything Terminator Genisys was trying to accomplish in the first place. Also, I hope the John Connor curse finally gets its way to biting John-whatever-his-name-is who played him.
Schwarzenegger for President.
This over-50-year-old franchise cares about as much about continuity as your grandmother cares about Fortnite (which I couldn't care less about either, for the record).
If you want to talk continuity problems and screwing up the timeline, there's no better place to look than the Saw franchise.
Every new twist seems to make the timeline messier than the last, and the only justification one could possibly come up with is the Jigsaw Killer being an omniscient god who knows everything. Even that doesn't explain some of the ridiculous continuity errors that are continuously thrown around as the series hits its later installments.
They're pretty hilarious, though.
The end of the original showed Ralph and Vanellope actually getting along much better with the other characters in their respective games. They were good enough friends with Felix and the blonde sergeant to serve as best man and maid of honor at their wedding, and Ralph seemed to be friends with the other "villain" characters. All that was ignored in the sequel.
Vanellope declared herself president instead of princess at the end of the original. In the sequel, she's considered a princess again just so she can encourage the actual Disney princesses to dress like a Walmart ad.
Is it just me, or did each movie seem to retcon the previous film's explanation of the history between humans and Transformers? The King Arthur and Nazi moments were among the oddest. I sort of stopped trying to follow the story.
Thank goodness 2018's Bumblebee officially rebooted the story. Mind you, I didn't know it was a reboot while watching the darn thing in theaters, so when they retold the origin AGAIN, I almost threw up my arms in defeat.
The second and third movies both devote a considerable chunk of intro time re-writing the story from the previous film. Somehow, everyone was cool with it, and the series is seen as a linear trilogy in spite of all the retconning. I guess continuity isn't too big of a problem when everyone loves the movies.
Each subsequent film almost feels like it takes place with a different family in a whole different reality. They can't even seem to keep Leatherface's name straight in these films (yes, I know the reboots did that intentionally). That doesn't mean they're not still brainless, gory fun.
The issues weren't so glaring back during the original Harry Potter years. Sure, The Prisoner of Azkaban conjured up a lot of visual discrepancies (the location and landscape of Hagrid's Hut, for example), but the storyline seemed to keep itself safe from making chronological mistakes.
It would appear, however, that the Fantastic Beasts films don't care to keep that careful streak intact. From what I hear, the second film is kind of sloppy in that regard.
Only the first film of the series had great continuity.
The Dragon Ball movies aren't canon to the main series. The whole TV series itself is a continuity problem, especially the dumb Super part of the series, which went against so many things that were mentioned in the Z part of the series.
Now, I've never seen any of the sequels, but they're famous for being irredeemably screwed, continuity-wise.
Even if you ignore the fact that Bond changes appearances every few movies, every movie taking place in the "present" - meaning the year they were each released - becomes a problem when said series goes on for fifty years. This, in turn, brings up some questions about Bond's history and longevity.
How was this not on the list when I first looked at it? I had to include Marvel's Dumb Universe on this list.
If you're talking about the Harvey Dent skin color change between Returns and Forever, then yes.
I know that there are lots of timelines, but...
Please see both parts of Mr. Enter's review of Norm of the North 2.
Enough said...
Yeah, I am an Enterbot, but not one who comes up with the same exact opinion as him even though I agree with most the opinions he has like Modern Nickelodeon was literal garbage and Classic Cartoon Network is full of admirable animation (pun partially intended). - The Ultimate Daredevil
