8 Hopelessly Tangled Movie Continuities

4. The Universal Soldier Series

This humble franchise has had a bizarre journey since it began in 1992. The original teamed Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren as resurrected soldiers, and it was basically an excuse for the two men to punch each other.

The next two movies Brothers In Arms and Unfinished Business went straight to video and were intended to launch a TV series. Van Damme is nowhere to be found, though Burt Reynolds and Gary Busey pop up as villains. The next theatrical movie was The Return, where Van Damme has been cured of death (?), and is helping to train some new Universal Soldiers. They go crazy, he kills them all and the film mercifully ends.

The third film (technically the fifth if you count the TV movies) is Regeneration, which ignores The Return completely and Van Damme is suddenly a zombie soldier again. He goes to Chernobyl to fight terrorists and a clone of Dolph.

The last film is Day Of Reckoning, where a man hunts Van Damme after he supposedly murdered his family. Anyone trying to trace the series timeline at this stage should just give up, since not even the original seems to be canon anymore.