12 Easy Solutions To Save The X-Men Franchise

And, following on from that - no more godd*mn time travel.

There isn’t a franchise in cinema that hasn’t been tangled into a thick web of bullsh*t by the inherent paradoxes incumbent in time travel. The Back To The Future films became a mathematical nightmare, while the Terminator movies have officially begun tunnelling up their own backsides.

These are not rigorously plotted novels or marathon seasons of television. These are two hour popcorn flicks, intended to be watched in a single sitting, and they need to be coherent, or at the very least comprehensible.

And no, it’s not enough to script a massive expositional splurge of timey-wimey nonsense and have the Xander of your group of protagonists comically exclaim that he can’t follow it, or for everyone to agree not to think about it because ‘time travel gives them headaches’. That’s just a giant lampshade to your audience that you don’t really understand it either, and can’t be bothered to fix it or make it more intelligible.

X-Men: Days Of Future Past was an unusually strong X-Men movie, but it’s properly thrown the cat amongst the pigeons. Figure out what the timeline of 2018 looks like now, set the next X-Men movie in it and come up with a story. It’s not rocket surgery.