10 Things The X-Men Franchise Wishes It Could've Done Differently

8. Maintained A Consistent Timeline & Continuity

When Fox decided to send the X-Men franchise back in time for a series of prequels that would progressively venture back towards the original Bryan Singer movies, they decided to take an extremely loose approach to internal continuity, as left many fans understandably frustrated.

The biggest problem was the gigantic, near-decade-long time leaps between movies, such that between the first prequel movie, First Class (released in 2011), and the last one, the recent Dark Phoenix, the timeline had shifted from 1962 to 1992 - an entire 30 years.

Except, none of the focal cast members seemed like they'd aged more than a few years: in Dark Phoenix, Michael Fassbender's Magneto is less than a decade from looking like a pension-age Ian McKellen, and yet you'd never guess his character was supposed to be 62 years of age, given Fassbender being just 42 himself.

That's just one example, but it's a major distraction across the board, to say nothing of the headache-inducing timey-wimey inconsistencies introduced by Days of Future Past.

Though that movie smartly jettisoned many of the elements fans hated most from the franchise, it also seemed to create a concrete end-point for the franchise set in 2023, where the X-Men are all happily alive.

Dark Phoenix never ended up circling back to this, and between Jean Grey's (Sophie Turner) dubious demise at the end of the movie and the utter ickiness of a potential Sophie Turner/Hugh Jackman romance, it just didn't slot together in a satisfying or convincing way.

This, it seems, is what happens when you have all the ambition to create a sprawling franchise, yet none of the organisational skill to actually pull it off.

While it's easy to appreciate Singer's desire to undo the less-savoury elements introduced after he didn't return for the third X-Men film, the lack of internal creative foresight across the subsequent movies is absolutely staggering.