How 'X-Men: Days of Future Past' invented the movie multiverse
Ten years ago, Professor X met Professor X.
Superhero movies used to ignore their own past. I’m talking early 2010s, Man of Steel and The Amazing Spider-Man, new beginnings launching away from past adaptations. Re-exploding Krypton, re-murdering Uncle Ben. Marvel Studios kept obscuring previous Hulks as the green giant approached Avengers. A decade ago, the CW was bricklaying its first Arrow spinoff, but the hotter show on the bigger network killed Bruce Wayne’s parents in Scene One.
No one was meeting any famous alternate-reality selves. No one thought Michael Keaton would be Batman again; a movie about how done he was with Batman won Best Picture. Nicolas Cage was not in two multiverses. “Multiverse” was not a word spoken onscreen. To find a thing like X-Men ’97, you had to visit the comic book store, where Batman ’66 revived Adam West’s Caped Crusader on the page.
Comics embraced history long ago, because long ago there was already too much history. In 1985, DC released Crisis on Infinite Earths, with Old Superman, Young Superman, and a hundred other super-variations. Marvel Comics did something similar circa 2014, with a lengthy saga about incursions across dimensions. Alternate realities recycled aging concepts, bringing back ancient styles or older characterizations.
From Hollywood’s perspective, I think, that all looked unwieldy, off-putting, just weird as hell. Executives had a prequel mentality after Batman Begins. But while the narratives circled back to origins, the productions sped away from their recent past. New actors and different creative teams took over. We live in a different world. Today, all hope for the summer box office rests on Deadpool & Wolverine jumping headfirst into its cameo-referential multiverse.
X-Men: Days of Future Past changed everything.
Released ten years ago today, the film has a sideways rep. Directed by a man nobody wants to remember, time-locked to the Jennifer Lawrence cultural minute. Two of cinema’s most astonishing superpower setpieces focus on Evan Peters’ Quicksilver and Fan Bingbing’s Blink, characters who barely matter to the plot. Richard Nixon, I’m certain, has more dialogue than Storm. The story requires a mutant who phases through walls to suddenly also be able to send consciousnesses back in time.
In conclusion, it’s wonderful. And influential. The time travel plot collapsed multiple screen eras, and even revived a few dead characters. It’s not a literal multiverse but a palpable figurative one — an effective way to get Michael Fassbender and Ian McKellen on a Dueling Magnetos press tour. 14 years after the first X-Men feature, the Superhero Movie had history to mine. Future Past invented the future by rediscovering the past.
Fox had been bungling its superteam franchise. X-Men: The Last Stand, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and X-Men: First Class were all qualified hit-misses, high earners of variable quality that never owned the zeitgeist. Christopher Nolan and the Marvel Cinematic Universe were rocketing over the billion-dollar mark. In 2013, The Wolverine grossed about $250 million less than Man of Steel and $800 million under Iron Man 3.
How to compete? The solution only seems obvious in hindsight. A legendary 1981 comics saga featured grown-up Kitty Pryde traveling from dystopian 2013 to alter present-day events. Future Past uses that double-timeline model to split focus between distinct X-teams. While the original crew reunites in a broken near-future, the First Classers reassemble in the 1970s.
Besides Hugh Jackman’s immortal Wolverine, the two ensembles don’t interact — with one critical exception. Patrick Stewart’s Professor X delivers an inspirational speech to James McAvoy’s younger Professor. This scene climaxed the trailer, which was more influential than anything in movie. The first third of the 2:17 spot is just moody shots of OG characters (including Anna Paquin’s Rogue, all-but-deleted from the final cut.) This was something new for the mainstream. The salesmanship depended on deep audience memory, a wild-but-true assumption that Shawn Ashmore’s Iceman could elicit a bigger trailer gasp than some new brown-haired boy slinging Tobey Maguire’s old webs. (The recent Deadpool & Wolverine trailer aims for a similar referential shock with Iceman’s old rival Pyro, played onscreen by Aaron Stanford for the first time in eighteen goddamn years.)
Worth pointing out director Bryan Singer previously resurrected the genre’s past with 2006’s Superman Returns. That Christopher Reeve homage had an obvious problem: No Christopher Reeve. The Spider-Verses playfully evoke old Spider-things, but a live-action multiverse builds off the audience’s relationship with specific performers. The third Deadpool wouldn’t be the fourth Wolverine with anyone but Jackman.
Future Past made $746 million, beating Amazing Spider-Man and Captain America: The Winter Soldier. The Flash TV series debuted later in 2014, with the 1990 Flash playing the new hero’s dad. That series wound up keystoning the CW’s multiverse, which warm-hugged all pre-existing canons and even let Brandon Routh replay his Returns Superman. 2021’s WandaVision cast Evan Peters as a distaff Quicksilver, the first of many MCU X-cameos. Now Marvel’s big summer bet is selling its first Disney-takeover X-Men spinoff around reality-hopping multiverse shenanigans.
Meanwhile, Sony’s guiding principle has become “Spider-Man Meets Spider-Men.” A calamity-plagued movie version of The Flash wound down the DC Extended Universe with three Batmen in a reality-smashing flop. The MCU embraced the multiverse right as its hit streak ended. Deadpool & Wolverine could break the slump. Worth considering, though, what happened to the X series. I have dumb love for 2016’s gaudy X-Men: Apocalypse, but it earned $200 million less than Future Past. The First Class team dwindled into Dark Phoenix. Logan was successful because it went so opposite, obliterating its franchise down to bare essentials. The Deadpools were referential, but I think their meta-runty success relied on how snarkily distant they were from other X movies. At least, until now.
Mashing eras together reignites a fanbase. It also risks a comedown when the next installment returns to normal forward progression. (Taylor Swift appears to be experiencing that whiplash in 2024.) The moment people buy your greatest-hits compilation is also the moment they start caring less about new material. So Future Past was a gigantic success the mainline X-Men series never recovered from.
Epilogue: Blink throws reality-ripping purple teleportation shards. This is cooler than any superpower in the Avengers or the Justice League.