X-MEN CINEMATIC UNIVERSE TIMELINE

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Last Updated: 
24th February 2017
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INTRODUCTION

In the year 2000, 20th Century Fox began the X-Men film franchise, which now boasts an impressive nine motion pictures, with several more in production. After a well-received beginning, the franchise wobbled in ticket sales and reviews with its middle releases, prompting a soft reboot of the franchise when X-Men: First Class went back in time to a 1960's setting. The soft reboot became hard and fast when X-Men: Days of Future Past explicitly altered the future and cancelled out many of the less-warmly-received aspects of past movies.

As a result, the movie continuity timeline can be a bit complicated to understand. This article intends to put all known dates and events from the X-Men movie universe in chronological order. Effort will be made to distinguish events that were true before DoFP from those that are true in the new timeline. Particular focus will be placed on X-Men Origins: Wolverine, a movie which includes multiple contradictions to movies both before and after it in the timeline, to the point where it is virtually apocrypha.

Regarding the actual date of "modern" events, the original movie was released in 2000, but self-identified as being in "the not too distant future". Subsequent modern era movies from 2003, 2006, and 2013 were not clear about their actual date, or how long it had been since the previous movie's events. Some dialogue from X2 indicated it was little more than a month since X1, and the context of X3 (i.e. Cyclops' mourning, the students still being students) doesn't indicate three full years passed between X2 and X3. While it is possible Logan exiled himself to the wilderness for seven years between X3 and The Wolverine, that's not obviously the case either. For simplicity's sake, this article assumes when a movie says something happened "X years ago", they mean X number of years before the movie's release date, but this is us acknowledging that a sliding timescale of some sort is at play.

It should be noted that this timeline only reflects the movies themselves. Additional in-canon movie materials have been released over the years, including comic book and prose novel adaptations, original comics, video games, official websites, and more. Many of these releases successfully and legitimately expanded upon the particular movie they were associated with. However, their tendency to use non-movie comic characters to pad out their casts complicated matters when subsequent movies used the characters in entirely different ways. Because the secondary materials arguably cause as many problems as they solve, this timeline shall not include their history or events.

The first page will be a timeline of all events established in the movies. The release of X-Men: Apocalypse has firmly established the new timeline is largely irreconcilable with the original movies, due to various character interactions and roles. Therefore, events from the current timeline are presented in Black, events from the original movies, now overwritten by DoFP, are in Blue, and events from X-Men Origins Wolverine are in Red because it was just SO bad (and contradicted multiple events in the timeline of movies releases both before and after it).

The second page breaks down the information by character, with major characters receiving entries that list trivia points relating to their movie continuity and notable differences from the comic.