Warning! The following article contains some massive spoilers for X-Men: Days of Future Past. If you missed the film in theaters this summer and still wish to not know how the movie ends, please head over to one of our other lovely articles on the site!
By the time the credits role at the end of Bryan Singer’s X-Men: Days of Future Past, everything about the entire franchise has changed. Because the titular mutant team is able to stop the assassination of Bolivar Trask and halt the production of Sentinels, the entire future timeline is completely altered, meaning that the events featured in all of the past films – except for X-Men: First Class – never actually happened. But while all of us have been focusing on the changes that this has had on what we know about the main characters in the series, there is a very important aspect that we have been overlooking. According to writer/producer Simon Kinberg, fans should be paying closer attention to the effects that Days of Future Past has had not just on mutant history, but human history as well.
This little hint about the future of the X-Men franchise was dropped by Kinberg last week when I had the opportunity to interview him in advance of Days of Future Past’s coming home video release. Discussing the freedom that comes with wiping the series’ continuity slate clean, the filmmaker noted that there are certain events in the recent movie that are going to leave a significant impact on the world at large that are going to have an effect on the future of X-Men movies.
"I don’t know if you were born or were alive in 1973, but I was, and as far as I know, a stadium did not drop on the White House," Kinberg said, laughing. "All human history has changed after Days of Future Past, not just whether Jean or Scott lived or died. What that gives us, which is great fun, is we can also mess around with human history. We aren’t beholden to everything that happens in future X-Men movies being secret, because if you were to hold to the original X-Men movies, at the beginning of X-1, it’s really the first conversations about mutants in the world. But if in 1973 a stadium fell on the White House or in the 1980’s there was an apocalyptic event, conversations would have started much earlier."
Basically, it sounds like the "secret" of mutants living among normal humans is going to be coming out decades earlier than it did in the previous timeline. How exactly this is going to change things, however, remains a mystery. One might guess that this would simply increase the amount of discrimination against mutants, with people simply seeing them as an even bigger threat, but the exact details on how this big change will alter things going forward could be fascinating.
We still have a little while to wait until we get to see the result of this development, as X-Men: Apocalypse won’t be in theaters until May 27, 2016, but you’ll be able to study the new timeline all you want when X-Men: Days of Future Past arrives on Blu-ray October 14th.
