Once a film franchise gets to be a certain length, things may start to get a little wonky. We’re firmly in the age of movie multiverses, where everything is made up and the deaths don’t matter, but even before our current era of timeline sandwiches and prequel/sequel/reboot fudging, there was some funny business going on. There’s nothing like a retcon to set a wayward film series back on track—or derail it permanently forevermore.
Movies usually try to be a little elegant with their retcons, changing a detail here and there and acting like things have always been this way. A retcon, or “retroactive continuity,” is a way for a series to say, yeah, we know we did one thing before, but let’s just pretend like something else happened instead. Some of these work—Darth Vader revealing himself to be Luke Skywalker’s father is a retcon that works like a well-timed twist, and everything after it confirms that it’s thematically appropriate. Some of them are a little less elegant.
What we love most are the retcons that are so obvious it’s like the movies themselves are winking and nodding to their audience, saying, Yeah, yeah, we know you’re not stupid, just play along, okay? These retcons are sloppy, obvious, and often utterly hilarious, like the filmmakers threw up their hands and gave up on trying to make something fit within an established continuity. Who cares?? Well, we care—enough to make an entire list of these sloppy retcons, after which we’ll never look at a franchise’s timeline the same way again.
The 10 Most Obvious Retcons in Major Movie Franchises
It’s not an elegant solution, but it’s a solution!
Gallery Credit: Emma Stefansky
READ MORE: The 10 Worst Remakes of the Last 10 Years
10 Great Movies Whose Original Ideas Were Terrible
We’ve all got to start somewhere.
Gallery Credit: Emma Stefansky
