If a comic book has been running for a few decades, it’s inevitable that its continuity and mythology is a big, tangled mess. Anyone who denies this is deluded, and has never noticed the eye rolls, the scoffs, or the yawns as they try to explain the twists and turns of Thor, Batman, or Hawkeye. When a big studio adapts a comic book character to the big screen, it’s necessary to cherry pick through their saga, to thread in the elements that work and scrap the ones that don’t. It’s the benefit of having decades of continuity — you have hindsight and the ability to toss the awful stories that seemed so cool in 1992.
But often, studios just take it too far. There’s a reason these characters and their basic storylines — Superman is from Krypton, Joe Chill killed Batman’s parents, Magneto is a Holocaust survivor — have endured so long. They’re simple. They’re good. The fundamental core is sympathetic. Of course Batman becomes a vigilante. Who wouldn’t? Superman will never truly be of Earth, yet he protects it unfailingly. Magneto’s great tragedy is to be as intolerant as those who put him in a concentration camp. And so on. People respond to those very basic threads, and changing them out of ignorance or spite is a surefire way to kill your franchise and alienate the fanbase.
The most obvious and damning example is the way Fox has handled its Marvel franchises, particularly the X-Men, and its most popular member, Wolverine. (Yes, I rail about these characters a lot. But they are my favorites!) Now, Bryan Singer’s films are good. They certainly get to who the heart of who and what the X-Men are, which is always the heart of any good comic adaptation. But they could have been better had they not gleefully rearranged continuity and characters in ways that shortchanged any potential sequels.
The first X-Men film shouldn’t have been The Tale of Wolverine. It should have been the tale of how Cyclops, Jean Grey, Storm, Iceman, Angel, and Beast were recruited by Professor Charles Xavier, and transformed into the X-Men. In short, it should have been what X-Men: First Class was, except with the classic lineup, and Wolverine thrown in for color and ticket sales. (His crude introduction to the X-Men is still perfect. He just shouldn’t have been the focus.) The first three films could have been the Dark Phoenix saga, and ended with the death of Jean Grey, and the arrival of Kitty Pryde, who will always be Wolverine’s true teenage sidekick. Other characters, such as Colossus, Rogue (a proper adult, not a becloaked teenager), Gambit, Nightcrawler, and Emma Frost could have been folded in. The X-Men are a constantly fluctuating team. They are a franchise that could constantly refresh itself. Even established team members could be gently taken out (they’ve all left the team at one time or another) and replaced with someone new. With those new characters come new storylines. Loyalty to the source is a smart move when that source is still running and selling well. It’s a free template to a tentpole.
But hey, the movies are what they are. They have their fans and their detractors. For better or worse, they have forged their own continuity and mythology. Comic books know all about reboots and retcons, and readers can accept a teenage Rogue, a dead Cyclops, and an Emma Frost who is now too old to ever get it on with Scott Summers. It’s OK. We can cope. But Fox couldn’t even maintain that internal mythology as evidenced by the poor Old Canucklehead.
But fans couldn’t leave it at that. (They never could with Wolverine.) Neither can a studio longing to spin-off this most popular and marketable of mutants. So they decide to give him a prequel/origin story. This should be the easiest job in the world since there’s a tidy template laid out in X2, and any holes can be filled by what Wolverine’s long and exhausting comic run has established. Or, you could throw it all out the window, and spin a story of a mutant who happily volunteers to be injected with adamantium and has a grand time playing with his claws until someone shoots him with an Amnesia Bullet. It doesn’t match a single thing that came before, but who cares? No one but unwashed nerds will remember, and Hugh Jackman is shirtless, so shut up. (That can’t excuse all sins, Fox.) None of that even touches that Sabretooth is, inexplicably, two different characters (one a mute brute, the other Liev Schreiber) and that it will be hard to explain how Deadpool grew his lips and head back if he gets his own movie.
There is a persistent belief that your average moviegoer won’t care about any of this. But all moviegoers appreciate logic in their franchises. They will remember — because Fox will, in self-destructive pique, remind them with a Wolverine and Sabretooth cameo — that Deadpool died in X-Men Origins: Wolverine. The Comic Book Guy who snidely informs them of a postcredit scene will get a blank look, an eye roll, and a “This is why I hate comic book movies. It’s so confusing, and they just do whatever they want!” that translates into diminishing box-office returns.
Fox is the easy example, but every studio has done it. Sony’s The Amazing Spider-Man has a hard road to climb once audiences realize this is a new Peter Parker, discovering his superpowers all over again, and that the previous three films no longer count. Warner Bros. is fervently hoping that people don’t show up to Zack Snyder’s Superman waiting for him to fly the friendly skies with his son, Superboy. If Fox decides to make X-Men 4, audiences are going to be very confused as to whether it’s the “young ones” or “the old ones,” and how all those Wolverine films fit in. Marvel has to wrestle with what happened to the previous Hulks, and why he is now Mark Ruffalo. No one wants to have to research before they see a movie, and they shouldn’t have to. Each movie should stand alone, but each movie should reward the people who have turned up for each and every installment. Characters should have a consistent backstory that directly affects how they’ll react to events in this chapter. It’s Storytelling 101, and absolutely crucial when you’re dealing with the bright and outlandish characters of the comic page.
Ironically, this is the exact plight that faces your average Joe or Jane if they decide to visit a comic shop and pluck a random issue from the rack. The only difference is that they can pick up a trade collection, and get a coherent and satisfying string of tales. So far, they can’t do the same with a movie trilogy because those characters are always yanked out of their arc in favor of a new cast, crew, and storyline.
Obviously, continuity and canon shouldn’t get in the way of a good story. (If we stuck to Wolverine to the bloody end, we’d end up with Daken, and no one wants that.) But continuity matters to a coherent and affecting cinematic franchise. It’s how fans, new and nerdy, become invested in the characters and their dire predicaments. Marvel and DC could not have become successful serializers without that essential rule, even if they do bend it until it almost breaks, and it’s no different with their cinematic counterparts. If the pieces don’t fit together, no one cares. Looking out at the current superhero landscape, with its rebooted and disjointed franchises, it’s hard to know how much longer they will.
