After decades of overlapping stories, comic book continuity becomes increasingly messy and confusing. The Avengers fight Kang The Conqueror through the timestream, 4 different Supermen appear at once, alternate universe planets where Spider-Man is a Japanese kid with a robotic suit, entire dimensions are collapsed and reborn, Beast brings the old X-Men from the 60’s to the present day and almost everyone has died at least once. Trying to parse this all out and make sense of it is largely impossible. There’s too many inconsistencies, paradoxes and absurd comicbook-y explanations to ever make 100% sense, so readers learn to take what works with the particular story they are reading, and fudge the rest.
Enter, 20th Century Fox, who have managed the incredible feat of making nearly as big a mess, in just 9 X-Men films. Each new one seemingly created solely to confuse the last, ignoring basic continuity even when directed by the same person. To give them credit, they did attempt to clear up their clusterfuck and streamline the movies with the 2014 film X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST, but that only wound up creating more problems than it answered. How did Charles survive being disintegrated? When exactly did Magneto and Charles meet? Did Raven grow up with Charles, or was she just another villain tagging along with Magneto? What the everloving fuck was X-MEN ORIGINS, and why haven’t those responsible been brought to justice? As satisfying as it was watching Hallie Berry’s Storm bite the dust, the film didn’t do a great job of clearing things up.
So, in what can be described as an error in judgement, I decided one night that I would sort it out. I would be Fox’s “Fix-It Felix Jr”, roll my sleeves up, stick my hands in and once and for all make sense of this spaghetti bowl of movie continuity. What follows is my Grand Theory of X-Planation, as near as possible a complete timeline of the events of the X-Men films, when they take place, and how they link together. Grab a cup of coffee, this is going to take a while.
* contains spoilers for all the X-Men films, obviously *
OK, so right off the bat we need to lay some things down. Firstly, yes, X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE is a thing that happened, and as much as we would all like to forget about that and ignore it, I can’t. It was made, it’s going in. Sorry. Next, I have had to take some slight guesses with a few things that are never outright stated, mainly with character ages. For this, if no exact age could be determined I went with an approximation based on how old the character is implied as being (teen, college age, adult etc), and the actors age in the film. Thirdly, some of this is just theory and I have had to come up with my own head cannon for it, otherwise it flat-out makes no sense like Moira MacTaggart being in both X-MEN: FIRST CLASS, and X-MEN: THE LAST STAND, at around the same age, despite those films being over 40 years apart. Any theories only help make sense of continuity errors if no explanation is provided, I have tried my best to fit everything in as it is shown to the viewer and not ignore cannon if it doesn’t fit. As a rule, if a character is born before a split (branch) in a timeline, they must exist in both. If a character is born after, they can be born in a different year or under different circumstances in the separate branch. Lastly, events we directly witness in the films often seem to cause new timeline branches to form. New branches will be marked with brackets.
We start in ancient Egypt, in the MAIN TIMELINE, with the first mutant in the world, Apocalypse. His four horsemen are killed protecting him while he does a fountain of youth spell, and as a pyramid collapses he is buried, and will stay there for thousands of years. Fast forward and in the early 1800’s, an unseen event causes a branch to form the [ORIGINS TIMELINE].
In this new timeline, in 1832, James Howlett is born the stepbrother of Victor Creed. During a traumatic event in 1845, James’ mutation kicks in and he produces bone claws from his hands. He kills a man later revealed to be his father, Johnathan Logan. James adopts his surname as his own, going by James Logan, or just Logan. The pair run away, fight in wars and such, and the events of X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE take place between here and 1979.
Here’s your first bit of good news, this film, this boil on the good face of superhero films, isn’t connected to any other in the franchise. While it does exist, it poses far too many inconsistencies for it to be linked in a timeline with anything else. Logan and Victor are not related in any other film, Wade Wilson is alive in 2016, Victor is incredibly different both in appearance and intelligence between this and X-MEN. Although Charles makes an appearance, as does Scott Summers, and they are about the right ages to fit, it just makes no sense whatsoever that this is part of the main timeline. This is the last we see of this timeline, we can presume events carry on along the same lines as the first X-MEN trilogy, with Charles, Magneto, the Phoenix and such. In a way, its pretty fascinating that they made this after an entire trilogy of films, and couldn’t even match it up with them.
Back in the MAIN TIMELINE, similar things happen with Logan without sharing a father with Victor. He sprouts bone claws, we hear he has fought in wars “too many fuckin’ wars”, and the earliest we see of him is in 1945 in Japan, saving Officer Yashida from the nuclear bomb dropped on Nagasaki. As for our other characters, Erik, Charles and Raven are all born between 1930 and 1934. The Mystique we see in FIRST CLASS is in fact the same person as appears in X-MEN 1-3, her life simply travels two different paths. Raven’s mutation causes her body to age very slowly, so when she is made human in THE LAST STAND, she still appears to be only in her mid 30’s when in reality she is around 70 years old. Erik’s powers manifest at Auschwitz in 1944, pushed by Dr Schmidt who murders his mother. Shortly after, in New York, a 10 year old Raven breaks into the house of Charles Xavier in search of food. She meets Charles and he explains she doesn’t have to be afraid, and that he is a mutant just like her. She is taken in by Charles and the pair become close friends. 
This event of Raven meeting Charles in 1944 causes the timeline to split again, the most impactful for the films that follow. A new branch, [X1-3 TIMELINE] is formed where Raven doesn’t meet Charles, perhaps she picked a different house, or Charles didn’t hear her, leading to the different events, including the films X-MEN, X2 and X-MEN: THE LAST STAND.
This is the least confusing timeline, from here on no major changes happen and the films are largely consistent between one another. Logan enters the Weapon X program and loses all memory before 1985, Jean becomes the Phoenix, Scott and Charles are killed, Logan has to stop her. The only addition I will add, is that Charles does indeed transfer his consciousness into his comatose twin brother, missed by a lot of people because they stuck it in an after credits scene. Also appearing is a doctor we briefly saw earlier in the third film, Moira MacTaggert. I propose that this is the daughter of Moira that appears in First Class. In this timeline, Moira never helps Charles in 1962, just continues her career at the CIA and has a daughter, who pursues medicine and helps Charles out with his studies, and takes care of his brother. I agree that’s all a bit convenient, especially both their first names being Moira, but it’s a story fix that can explain her appearance. We don’t need to revisit this timeline again, everything is nicely contained and surprisingly consistent, we can speculate that the future is reasonably bright for mutants, with Beast joining the UN as ambassador.
Separating the X-Men films at the moment of Raven meeting Charles, essentially solves most of the biggest continuity errors of the series. From that point events will naturally vary slightly, but Raven and Charles’ stories would vary hugely, leading to several things occurring in this timeline [MT] that don’t happen in others. Big things have small beginnings, and a chance meeting while looking through a fridge will have enormous consequences as those ripples in time get further out. Everything starts off with X-MEN: FIRST CLASS, which ends up being a huge event that causes further trouble down the road, and is the first moment that the two big timelines have very different histories. In 1962, while intervening in the Cuban missile crisis, Charles is paralysed accidentally by Erik (in [X1-3] Charles isn’t paralysed until after at least 1985), and Raven leaves him to join Erik’s brotherhood. This leads them both down a dark path, one we see in X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST, but interestingly one film is released in between them, and as appears to be the rule, a Wolverine movie confuses things.
2013’s THE WOLVERINE served two purposes, firstly to give us a decent Wolverine movie, and then to get him past the Jean Grey moping and into the new series of films. Unfortunately, as I have just shown, those two aren’t part of the same timeline. Its presented to the viewer that this film takes place in the [X1-3] TL, after the events of THE LAST STAND, with Logan mourning the loss of Jean, but several big things contradict this. Firstly, he’s having flashbacks to WW2, saving a Japanese Officer at Nagasaki, something we know from X-MEN in the [X1-3] TL, he is unable remember, but an even larger problem being after the credits, when who should appear? Charles Xavier, rolling in like he wasn’t disintegrated into a billion pieces a few years ago. Sigh. It has been suggested (and I think even implied by the film itself) that this is perhaps that comatose body of Charles’ twin brother, but we know from DAYS OF FUTURE PAST (a film that 100% happens in the MT) that Logan is recruited here to fight the upcoming war against the Sentinels. So really, what we have is a film where its makers didn’t even fully know where it was taking place, but from all the evidence, it stands to reason it happens here in the [MT] between FIRST CLASS, and the dystopian year 2023 we see in DAYS OF FUTURE PAST. This also, unintentionally, helps us fill in some gaps. We know that Jean must have also become the Phoenix in this timeline, and again only Logan was able to kill her. Presumably Charles was able to save himself this time, but Scott was still killed (bummer).
Around the time of this films production, I think Fox realised just how much of a god awful mess they’d created, and tried to clean house somewhat. They created a promotional website for DOFP, including a brief timeline of events that happened between FIRST CLASS and 2023, where their upcoming film would start. It actually had some cool bits such as confirming that a similar event happened in San Francisco to THE LAST STAND, mutants being banned from competitive sport, Raven joining a resistance group, Beast being murdered in 2015 and Guantanamo Bay being re-purposed for detaining mutants. Mainly though, it was set up to get two big plot points rolling for DOFP, that Erik was arrested for assassinating president JFK, and that after being murdered in 1973, Bolivar Trasks Sentinel program went into full swing, hunting down, imprisoning and killing mutants. This would all lead to the dystopian future we see in DOFP.
X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST causes a lot of the confusion people have over these films. Because it mashed together the new cast of FIRST CLASS, along with the old actors from X-MEN, and it wasnt entirely clear that these weren’t the same characters from those films, obviously people left with more question than ever. Hopefully if you’ve stuck with me this far it makes a little more sense now, this is an older Charles and Erik from FIRST CLASS. They share no connection with the X-MEN 1-3 films, despite being played by the brilliant Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen. Something else that weirded viewers out was how Kitty Pryde could now not only phase herself through things, but send people’s minds back in time? Secondary mutations are actually a fairly common idea in comics, so it wasn’t a big thing for some, perhaps if we had followed her journey in the X-MEN films she would’ve gained it there too. It’s essentially because they didn’t want to introduce yet another new character (Rachel Summers) with that power, so just gave it to Kitty. Fun twist, in the comics shes the one who actually gets “sent back”, not Logan.
In the film itself, it’s fairly straightforward. Raven killing Trask causes this dark future, Logan gathers the younger Charles and Erik to stop her doing so. Eventually they succeed, and we see that a new timeline branch is created [FIXED FUTURE TIMELINE].
We fast forward along this new branch and Logan wakes up, the year is again 2023, but this time everything is golden and wonderful. Jean and Scott are alive, as is Beast, mutants are thriving and the Sentinel War was avoided.
At the very end of DOFP we see Raven impersonate Stryker and rescue Logan from a river, presumably preventing him from going into the Weapon X program. Except he does, one film later. Now, this is straight up bad storytelling. Bryan Singer just ignores an enormous character moment, and tosses it in the bin. But because I am being so nice, I will explain this too. Earlier in the film, Hank explains that time is immutable, that you can cause ripples in the river of time, but it will always correct itself. Perhaps all Raven managed to do was buy Logan ten years more peace, before time caught up and events transpired to put him back in Strykers hands.
This leads us to the latest main X-film (before LOGAN), X-MEN: APOCALYPSE, and on the surface its good news! No time travel, no sending brains back into younger bodies, just a straightforward story about resurrecting a centuries old mutant with ill-defined powers that wants to destroy the world. Since 1973, Charles’ school has been a success, recruiting mutant kids and helping them learn in a safe environment. One consequence of this timeline I haven’t touched on yet is that mutants get exposed to the rest of the world a lot earlier than in the [X1-3] timeline, which leads to some interesting things. It’s a driving force behind them being even more aggressively feared, which caused the Sentinel Program to be on the table in DOFP, and in this film we see another effect, mutants becoming worshipped. Cults sprang up around them and began trying to find what they believed to be the first, and most powerful mutant in history, Apocalypse. On the face of it, this film is easy to place, it comes 10 years after DOFP‘s altered 1973, and is simply in between that and the fixed future Logan wakes up in. Nice and simple. Until LOGAN comes smashing into the picture. What is it with Wolverine films setting fire to everything?*
*Ok, I originally had a theory about where LOGAN took place, branching off after APOCALYPSE and in a new, contained future 2024 that explained everything, something which Hugh Jackman seemed to all but confirm, until director James Mangold then took to twitter and stomped all over my nice clean timeline. He clarified that LOGAN takes place in 2029, 6 years later than originally stated, and was in fact happening directly after the fixed future 2023 shown in DOFP, in the FFT.
Its fine, I knew trying to accurately detail where it was before the film had even come out was tempting fate with a franchise this absurdly messed up. My original theory is below, but for the purposes of the rest of the timeline, I have adjusted it according to the directors cannon.
According to the synopsis, LOGAN takes place in 2024, one year later than that golden future we see at the end of DOFP. In this future, mutant kind is on the brink of extinction, Logan’s healing factor has gone to shit, Charles has Alzheimers and it appears all the X-Men are dead. How can this possibly be just 12 months on from that paradise we saw? My theory is, it isn’t. What we are seeing in LOGAN is actually the future of the timeline APOCALYPSE takes place in, and that the awakening of him and the events around the film causes yet another branch in our timeline tree, the [DYSTOPIAN TIMELINE].
After all, Apocalypse dissolving entire cities, murdering thousands and disarming the world of all nuclear weapons would certainly rekindle that hatred for mutants, something that seemingly didn’t happen in the fixed future. It again plays in to the idea that we keep seeing events in these films causing timeline branches.
In the post credit stinger of APOCALYPSE, Essex Corp are shown to be handling cleanup of the Weapon X facility that Logan escapes from, from which they acquired his blood, and we know that Laura Kinney (X-23) appears in LOGAN, presumably the one successful clone they managed to produce. We can estimate her age at about 13, putting her birth around 2011, 28 years after the events of APOCALYPSE. In the comics we know they struggled endlessly to produce a successful clone, so this gap feels possible, perhaps 4-5 years of research and development, then 22 years of producing unsuccessful clones before Laura was born. We wont know until LOGAN is released if this is accurate**, but it could certainly be possible.
**Doesnt look that way, but I will update after the film releases.
Finally, presented more offset from the rest of the X-franchise is arguably the best film in the run, DEADPOOL. Deadpool is a weird character for the franchise, in that he breaks the fourth wall, acknowledges he is in a film series, and even mentions there are multiple timelines, so pinning him definitively to one is a bit of a guess.
He could just be a floating film, not being fixed to one line, but since we haven’t ignored any of the other films, I will lock it down. As far as we can guess, it looks brighter than the future portrayed in DOFP, and as Colossus appears to be much older than he was there, and is clearly Russian unlike in THE LAST STAND, it stands to reason that DEADPOOL happens in the brighter, fixed future timeline created in DOFP. Potential sequels involving time travelling Cable may screw around with this (and everything else here), but for now that’s where I think it takes place.
So there we have it. All of the X-MEN films put into a nice, neat timeline, free(ish) of absurd continuity errors and inconsistencies, hopefully you managed to make it to the end. The full size of the timeline image is too large to post here in its full resolution, so I put together a simplified version of where each film happens in relation to one another..
..with a link to the full timeline with accurate dates, events and added information >> here <<.
With rumours of Fox looking to soft reboot the franchise yet again, the TV show LEGION airing now, a second as yet untitled TV series, and another film beginning shooting some time in 2017 titled NEW MUTANTS, this problem isn’t likely to get better any time soon. But no matter, whenever a new X-Men film is released, I will be there front and centre, forever trying to untangle the mess.
#1: Batman of Zur-En-Arrh. In issue #113 of Batman, the caped crusader found himself teleported to a distant world, where he met the alien Tlano, who had observed what Batman was doing in Gotham and decided to become the Batman of his own planet, Zur-En-Arrh. Tlano and Batman teamed up to battle some giant robots, oh and regular Batman discovered that on this new planet he had Superman level powers..because comics.
that lego guy 