10 Times Comic Book Movies Departed From The Canon And It Was Great

4. X-Men: Days Of Future Past - It's Wolverine That Goes Back In Time

In many ways X-Men: Days Of Future Past was a more hubristically ambitious, potentially disastrous crossover of different Marvel characters and stories than The Avengers. In a franchise of wildly varying quality, rife with continuity errors resulting from multiple takes on multiple characters in multiple time periods, how could original director Bryan Singer bring together two casts of mutants and a bunch of new ones for a film that made sense and didn't feel overstuffed? It was a Godsend for the filmmakers wanting to bring their two time periods together that a dystopian future-time travel narrative was one of the comic's most popular arcs in its Chris Claremont-John Byrne heyday. But the smart thing from Singer and writer Simon Kinberg was to take the core premise of the comic and then make the changes that needed to be made in order for it to work in their movie universe. In the comic it is wall phaser Kitty Pryde who is thrown back to inhabit the mind of her decades younger self, but for the movie it becomes Wolverine. Just from a basic sense of plausible continuity, it doesn't make sense to use Kitty (seen as a child/teenager in the 2000s set X-Men trilogy) to phase back into her earlier self and join up with the 1960s-70s era First Class cast, given this version of Kitty was presumably born in the 90s. Beyond simply that practical point, though, it just makes more sense to use Wolverine for the movie story. He is the glue that binds the whole X-Men movie universe together, not just the obvious protagonist of the whole saga but also the only character that appears across every movie and every time period (his mutation also conveniently allowing him to look the same in the 1970s and near future). In a movie that has so much else going on and so many characters, it is very useful to have someone that the audiences knows so well, whose personality and story we are already invested in, to lead us into the story and keep it grounded. Ellen Page's Kitty is affable enough, but she would not have that impact without devoting a lot more time to her character.