10 Movies That Made Subtle Retcons They Hoped You Wouldn't Notice

When any movie franchise gets complex enough, retcons are basically inevitable - when there are that many artistic voices in the kitchen, it's impossible for every single detail to slot together perfectly.

And then sometimes filmmakers decide they simply don't like what came before and aggressively alter it in totally unsubtle fashion by way of a retcon.

Take the likes of 2018's Halloween, Deadpool 2, and Terminator: Dark Fate literally rewriting the timeline, while Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker walked back everything J.J. Abrams didn't like about The Last Jedi.

But sometimes retcons are a good deal more subtle than that, making changes to the existing mythos but in a sly and sneaky way which the causal observer will usually miss.

Yet of course, the hardcore crowd will spot these inconsistencies in a heartbeat, immediately exposing any tricky attempt to rewrite the narrative without the audience's knowledge.

In some cases these retcons were acceptable, even arguably necessary, while in others they were nothing more than frantic attempts to write the series out of a perceived corner.

Either way, these are some of the most low-key retcons you're likely to find in your favourite movie franchises...

Terminator 2: Judgment Day makes it very clear that young John Connor (Edward Furlong) is just 10 years of age when duelling machines are sent back through time to kill and save him respectively.

However, Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines makes a small yet significant adjustment to this, by having an older John (now played by Nick Stahl) claim in an opening narration that he was actually 13 years of age during the events of T2.

Director Jonathan Mostow actually made this retcon by mistake, by basing Connor's age on that of Edward Furlong while T2 was being shot, rather than deferring to the established age of Connor in the movie itself.

It's a retcon which creates a massive headache in the already soupy continuity and timeline of the Terminator movies, additionally suggesting that Sarah - who is said to be 29 years old in T2 - had John when she was just 16 years of age.

Between the iffy implications of her relationship with Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) and the fact Linda Hamilton was clearly much older than that while shooting the original Terminator, rejigging John's age makes no sense at all and could've easily been remedied with the most basic of homework.

Fans being fans, of course, they immediately noticed and called it out.