10 Biggest Ever Movie Franchise Mistakes
3. The Totally Ridiculous Timeline - X-Men
The X-Men franchise is undeniably instrumental in popularising superhero cinema, but even beginning to think about its pretzel-shaped timeline is to invite a major cluster headache.
After the original X-Men trilogy wrapped up, 2011 saw the release of X-Men: First Class, a rock solid prequel which slotted perfectly into the existing continuity.
But then its sequel, X-Men: Days of Future Past, made the bold decision to weaponise time travel to basically jettison unsavoury aspects of the franchise that both fans and director Bryan Singer hated, namely the deaths of Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) and Cyclops (James Marsden) in X-Men: The Last Stand.
At the time this felt like a fairly novel solution, before Hollywood began using time travel and alternate timelines en masse to rectify their creative carelessness.
But X-Men really started to become unstuck with its subsequent prequel-sequels, which hurried to barrel forward in time and catch up to the original 2000 X-Men movie.
Between 2011's First Class and 2019's Dark Phoenix, 30 years of story time had passed, and yet the central characters all looked comically young for their supposed ages.
Most notably, by the time Dark Phoenix came around Xavier (James McAvoy) and Magneto (Michael Fassbender) were apparently in their 60s yet looked in their 40s at most.
The prequels made it clear that neither Bryan Singer nor Simon Kinberg cared much about nurturing a consistent passage of time, and so audiences unsurprisingly stopped caring too.
By the time the series sputtered out with Dark Phoenix, it had become a sad, sorry shell of its former greatness.