9 Major Retcons That Saved Iconic Movie Franchises

6. A Nightmare On Elm Street Being A Fictional Movie - New Nightmare

As most slasher franchises tend to do, A Nightmare on Elm Street completely went off the rails in its final few instalments. Though it started out as a terrifying-as-all-hell group of films that, yeah, did have a wise-cracking murderer at the helm and featured actual dream wizards, by the end the films ventured so far into the fantastical that they were closer to comedies than anything else - and not in a good way.

Fortunately, New Nightmare capped the series off in a way that made sense of all those missteps. Original director Wes Craven returned to save the series from Freddy Krueger being remembered as someone who featured in Wizard of Oz parodies and killed his victims with a Nintendo Power Glove, by putting him in the real world. The flick retconned all seven prior flicks - even his seminal original - as being actual movies, events which happened in a fictional universe.

A chunk of the actors reprised their roles as fictional versions of themselves, forced to face off against the real Fred Krueger, whose spirit had been confined in the franchise but was now free. It was meta as all hell.

While throwing away decades worth of story was contentious, New Nightmare effectively saved this iconic horror villain from himself.