X-Men: Days of Continuity are Past

Who’s that girl?

X-Men: Days of Future Past is still being shown in German cinemas, and by now, probably more than a million people have seen it here. While I found it enjoyable enough, I’m still wondering who these Marvel films are made for. Or, to put it differently: are film makers still concerned about continuity at all, or is it considered nitpicking and party-pooping to point out continuity errors in this postmodern day and age?

Basically, I can think of four ways in which films deal with continuity:

a) the film is a stand-alone story and doesn’t need to adhere to any extra-textual continuity;

b) the film is part of a series of films and conforms to the continuity established by the earlier films;

c) the setting of the film (“world”/”universe”) is adapted from another medium and is consistent with the continuity established there;

d) the entire story of the film is adapted from another medium, and continuity is not an issue as long as the adaptation is faithful.

The problem with films like X-Men: Days of Future Past is that their category would be “e) all of the above”. There’s the continuity of the previous X-Men films and the continuity of countless X-Men comics, and X-Men: DoFP makes references to both and can’t be fully comprehended without ample knowledge of both. However, the two continuities are not quite compatible with each other, and each of them has its own issues, so it comes as no surprise that X-Men: DoFP isn’t free of continuity errors either. A month ago, Rob Bricken published this helpful overview on io9: http://io9.com/8-ways-x-men-movie-continuity-is-still-irretrievably-f-1581678509

Not mentioned there is the conundrum of Pietro/Peter Maximoff and his sister(s), which is explained in Empire magazine (see e.g. here).

All this makes me wonder: if everything we see in a film is potentially subject to later revisions, and ultimately nothing is authoritative, why do filmgoers still care about these stories at all? Many comic book readers, tired of convoluted continuities and endless retconning, have turned their backs on this kind of storytelling years ago. How long will it take cinema audiences to realise that all these superhero “cinematic universes” make little sense?