Board Thread:Administrative/@comment-1713281-20140529233519

Please don't reply in this thread if you're not an admin.

Be aware, there's a good amount of spoilers here for the film. But we're going to need an admin decision on the whole time-travel issue of the movie.

Basically, the point of contention here is whether the film follows the Multiverse line of thinking, much like we treat time travel in comic stories, or if it follows the "immutable timeline" thinking, where time travel simply re-writes history instead of branching off with a new universe.

Now, if you want to read up on all of the discussion the userbase has made, you can look at this talk page and this talk page. But if you don't want to read through all that text, I've summed it up below.

Here's what we know from the movie: It's 2023. Kitty Pryde has mastered the power of projecting someone back into the past. She has used this ability to project Bishop back in time just before their group is attacked by Sentinals; this warning is enough time for the past group to escape. She has used this ability numerous times, and each time we see it performed, the present version of Kitty and her subject vanish into thin air.

The main plot point is the Sentinal program is jump-started into existence when Mystique murders Bolivar Trask at the Paris Peace Accords in 1973. Kitty sends Wolverine's mind back into his 1973 body, with the mission of using the 1973 versions of both Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr to prevent the murder. As Kitty tells Wolverine before sending him back, as long as his mind is still in his 1973 body, both timelines will continue to exist simultaneously. However, once Wolverine's mind slips back to 2023, whatever affects he's had in the past will take hold. The new history Wolverine creates will become the only history that the rest of them know, and only Wolverine will remember the events of the universe prior to the changes.

On to the time theories. The first is the Multiverse theory: Wolverine's arrival in 1973 causes the creation of a new reality from that point onward. The most common argument for this one is that two realities exist at the end of the film. Earth-10005 and Earth-TRN414. Earth-10005 consists of all the previous movies (The original trilogy, Origins, The Wolverine, and First Class), while Earth-TRN414 consists of all the history of Earth-10005 prior to 1973 (First Class), and anything that happens in the "past" of this new movie after Wolverine's mind was sent back.

This would be the same line of thinking we use when it comes to comics. This is also supported by Brian Singer's comments about the film during an interview: "I don't want people to panic about us erasing the movies. I believe in multiverses". It seems worth noting that while two universes is the most common argument for this side, a few of our users are suggesting as many as 4 universes exist in this movie, with even more if you wish to ascribe the various time jumps of Kitty and Bishop to their own realities.

As for the "immutable timeline" thinking: Everything takes place in Earth-10005, both before and after Wolverine's jump to the past. This line of reasoning is that all the films still stand in this reality, and once Wolverine jumps back to 1973, he rewrites time, but never breaks from the timeline.

It's been argued by our users that the film does not necessarily need to be bound by the rules we apply to comics. This is also supported by comments made by screenwriter Simon Kinberg: ''“The end of Days of Future Past in 1973 does change the timeline of the established film universe. But one of the things we posit in the film is the immutability of time. So what you see at the end is a future that has been shifted but not completely transformed. Our characters are back in the mansion, as we saw them in X1-3, with some obvious changes (like certain characters being alive). So the answer is yes and no. Yes it changes the timeline. No it doesn’t completely erase everything...”'' Additionally, the film seems to suggest this with the way Kitty and the 2023 mutants are treated each time they avert the Sentinals. Instead of the attack continuing as its own reality, as it would with the multiverse theory, the mutants simply vanish from existence (the same happens when Wolverine's mind returns to 2023).

So the question is which one do we go with? 