In my 2014 review I said I had mixed feelings about a film reaching back to undo previous films, and that I’d probably be arguing with myself about it for a while. Twelve years on the argument resolved itself in a way I genuinely didn’t expect. The reset happened, and then almost nobody used it.
That’s the thing that jumps out now. Days of Future Past ends with the timeline repaired: mansion standing, Jean and Scott alive, Xavier back at his desk, The Last Stand quietly erased. Then Logan arrives in 2017 and that world is simply gone. No mansion, no school, the mutants dead or scattered, and a future every bit as bleak as the one this film spent two hours preventing. It doesn’t argue with the reset or explain its way around it. It just declines to be in that continuity at all, and it’s the best film the franchise ever made, so nobody complained. I wrote about Logan at the time as its own thing and barely mentioned this film, which was the right instinct even though I couldn’t have told you why. Logan works precisely because it isn’t carrying anybody else’s continuity on its back. Apocalypse turned up in between and managed to make the timeline messier rather than clearer, which was becoming the house style by then.
Which accidentally turned it into something more useful
Here’s the consequence nobody planned, and it’s why this film matters more to December than it did to 2014. If Days of Future Past had held, the Fox X-Men would now be one continuous timeline with a patch in the middle. Because it didn’t hold, because Logan went one way and Apocalypse went another and none of it reconciles with anything, the whole Fox run ended up being what it always secretly was, which is a set of branches rather than a line.
Deadpool & Wolverine eventually made that official, treating the Fox films as one more universe among many rather than a history that needed tidying up. In fairness that’s the only honest reading of a continuity which never once added up, and the first Deadpool was already breaking the frame years before anyone formalised it. So the repair job was real, the franchise stopped caring about it almost immediately, and the failure of the repair turned out to be more productive than its success would have been.
The popular theory now is that this film explains how Stewart and McKellen walk back on screen in December, since it already established that this franchise can move a mind through time and rewrite what happened. I don’t buy it, and the rewatch made me less convinced rather than more. What this film does is time travel inside one timeline: one history, edited. That’s a completely different operation to pulling actors out of a defunct continuity and dropping them into a live one, which is a multiverse move, and this film has no concept of parallel universes anywhere in it. Using it as the explanation means retrofitting a mechanism it doesn’t contain. My honest guess is that Marvel isn’t going to explain it and doesn’t need to, because the groundwork for characters crossing between universes got laid thoroughly elsewhere and December can simply use it.
The two-cast trick is the actual legacy
This film’s real contribution is smaller and much more interesting than the time travel, and it’s the part I underrated in 2014 when I called it something I’d been sceptical about and ended up enjoying most. It proved audiences will accept two casts playing the same characters in the same film without the story collapsing.
Doomsday is attempting exactly that at a far larger scale: multiple casts, multiple franchises, decades of separate continuity, all in one film. The reason that sounds feasible rather than absurd is that Days of Future Past did the small version first and it worked. McAvoy and Stewart in one film. Fassbender and McKellen in one film. Nobody was confused, nobody walked out, and the reviews at the time treated it as the franchise’s recovery rather than as a gimmick. Get that wrong and you have a mess on your hands. This is the proof it can be done, and it’s held up far better as a proof than as a plot.
McAvoy’s Charles is still the best performance in the run and I’d say it harder now than I did then. The broken 1973 version, walking because he’s medicated the telepathy away, choosing to move at the cost of being able to hear anybody, is the most interesting thing anyone has done with this character on screen. It’s a genuinely good idea about what that power would cost a person, and McAvoy plays the recovery as work rather than as a switch being flicked. Across everything I’ve rewatched for this project, that first act is the sequence I’d most want to show someone who thinks these films are just people in costumes hitting each other.
And the Pentagon kitchen is still the best scene in the film. Twelve years and a lot of imitators later, nothing has bettered it. What makes it last is that it isn’t a power demonstration, it’s a joke with a character inside it, built by somebody who sat down and thought properly about what that room would look like from his side of it. The franchise had a hundred chances to do that kind of thinking about other powers and mostly couldn’t be bothered. Fifteen minutes of screen time, walks off with the entire film, still true.
I gave it 3.5 or 4 in 2014 and I’d leave it exactly there, which is worth saying because plenty of things in this rewatch have moved. It’s not the best Fox X-Men film. It might well be the most useful one. It adapted the biggest story in the comics without embarrassing itself, put both generations of the cast on screen and made that feel natural rather than like a stunt, and demonstrated something about audience tolerance that the entire current strategy is now leaning on. The Sentinels remain the franchise’s best villain, and there’s something quietly funny about the most frightening antagonist in twenty-six years of X-Men films being a robot that wins by copying you.
Watch this one for the two-cast material rather than the time travel. When Doomsday puts Stewart’s Xavier in a room with people from a completely different studio’s continuity, this is the film that established the audience would go along with it. The rest, the careful repair of a broken timeline, turned out to be a road nobody took. Next in the rewatch is Logan, which is where that becomes very clear indeed, and which I already think is the best thing this franchise ever produced.