10 Films That Retconned Themselves (To Fix Glaring Mistakes)

Whom among us didn’t love the original Lethal Weapon? Quips and bullets flew with equal abandon in Shane Black’s snappy and surprisingly brutal debut script (re-watch it, it’s a harsher and sadder story than you remember).

So how was the hot shot screenwriter supposed to follow up such a punchy, unexpected success? Well, rather than retread the same territory as the first film, Black opted instead to deepen the lore of the franchise. The second film reveals that the death of Riggs’ wife was caused by one of the second movie’s primary villains, a case of collateral damage during an attempted assassination of Riggs himself.

It’s a touch which serves both to reaffirm how dangerous the Afrikaner apartheid antagonists are and to invest the case with personal significance for Gibson’s loose cannon. It’s a nice reminder, before we get deeper into this list, that not all retcons are cheap band-aid fixes, and the technique can be used to deepen and strengthen a story across numerous instalments.