X-Men: Days of Future Past – Comic vs Movie

Go just about anywhere in the world, and you will find comicbook readers who know the story title: Days of Future Past. Any X-Men comic fan will list Days of Future Past in their top 10 X-Men comics of all time. The storyline is timeless (no pun intended.) It is a classic. It is irreplaceable in canon, and it is virtually impossible to outdo it with any similar storyline. Being as good as it is, one would just know that the movie studios would try to adapt it for a theatrical release, and that’s exactly what happened in 2014. Bryan Singer returned to the director’s seat in the franchise and hit a home run with this one. Arguably the best X-Men movie ever released, Days of Future Past not only managed to put up a good competition against the likes of Captain America: The Winter Soldier (the X-Men movies were going through a period of lackluster performances with critics), but also managed to (mostly) right the wrongs caused by the vast number of continuity errors that the prequels had introduced. A beautiful movie, through and through, but it still falls under the same bracket as other comicbook movie adaptations. Just how much was different in the movies from the panels? This article will highlight some of the most obvious differences.

1. The Protagonist

The X-Men is a very diverse group of people who have the x-gene: a gene that makes them manifest superhuman powers at puberty, which led some people to believe that they were the next link in the evolutionary chain. The truth is, Stan Lee just wanted an easy way to give people superpowers without having to come up with some elaborate accident for every single one of them. It became a ripe property to introduce characters from around the world. Anybody could be a mutant. Anybody could manifest these powers. All it took was to have the x-gene within. Being such a wide IP, it would be difficult to have one central figure to call the protagonist of X-Men. Because the stories are so extensive, the main character is often decided by what the story is about. In the case of Days of Future Past, the main character is Kitty Pryde. There are variations of the story where the main character is Lucas Bishop, but the original one is Kitty Pryde. She travels from the year 2013 to 1983 to warn the X-Men about the construction of the sentinels and the destruction of not just the mutants and the X-Men, but the superhuman community in North America. The movie shifts that. Instead of it being Kitty who travels back in time in the movie, it is Wolverine. The in-universe reason is that the chosen time period is a time in which the cinematic Kitty hadn’t been born yet. The actual reason is that Simon Kinberg, writer of the movie, said that they did it like that because Wolverine is the protagonist of the series, so he had to be the one to time travel in the movie as well.

2. The Line Up

As mentioned above, the X-Men IP has so many characters in it. As a consequence, the team’s line-up always has alterations. There is never a fixed line-up for more than 5 years. There is always a character that leaves the team, goes on a break, has a personal crisis or has outgrown the team and wants to start a new adventure in life. The comics started off with the team consisting of Cyclops, Beast, Angel, Iceman and Marvel Girl, AKA Jean Grey. At the point in time that the Days of Future Past story was made, the team consisted of Storm, Wolverine, Colossus, Nightcrawler and Kitty Pryde in the present. Kitty was still a new member and was getting used to the physical appearance of Nightcrawler at the time. In the future, the line up was Magneto, Wolverine, Kitty, Colossus, Franklin Richards and Rachel Grey. The movie, having a lot of limitations due to the previous instalments, actor availability and the like, could not have the same line up as the source material. The line up in the movie consisted of Charles, Magneto, Wolverine, Kitty, Bishop, Storm, Warpath, Colossus and Sunspot in the future. In the past, the line up is Wolverine, Charles, Magneto and Beast. Well, until Magneto turns on them, that is.

3. The Ending

The ending is usually the best part. It is what could make or break a movie. It is where all the storylines, all the arcs have been leading to. In the source material, the main X-Men were from a future that we didn’t know about, or were familiar with. It was very far removed from the minds of the audience. The struggles they had against the Sisterhood of Mutants, led by Mystique as they tried to get Senator Robert Kelly to bite the dust, and the subsequent consequences, were different from the movie. After they stopped the Sisterhood from enacting their plan, there was still an unclear future left. We don’t really know what the future holds for mutantkind, and it’s shown in a way that sets up the future to be very similar if not identical. It is almost as if the sentinels are meant to become operational and wreak havoc in the future. In the movie, the ending was a bit clearer. It was a truly happy ending, as the future that we saw doomed and gloomy, full of despair, was fine. Everyone was happy and alive, and even characters who had been killed in previous instalments were back. The comics had a sort of ominous, dark ending, but the movie had a very happy ending.

4. Why some characters are missing

The X-Men comics are insanely convoluted and have so much going on at the same time. Many characters are written off, killed or just sidelined so often that it has become common practice for fans to compare who is the most underrated or nerfed character in the team, or in any other presented media that they appear in-if they do at all. Two very big characters in the X-Men mythos are Scott Summers and Jean Grey. It is almost compulsory for them to be in X-Men media. So, why weren’t they in the story? Well, things got very interesting in the X-Men stories. Jean Grey was corrupted by the Phoenix Force, and after a fierce battle against an alien empire, the X-Men had to lose one of their most valuable members. Jean Grey sacrificed herself and the X-Men mourned her death. Some characters took it harder than others. Scott Summers was one of them. He had seen enough, lost too much to continue trying to do the whole superhero thing. He left the team. It is only when he leaves that the whole thing with Kitty arriving from the future starts up. The movie is set after movies like The Last Stand, which famously killed off Charles, Scott and Jean Grey, as well as de-powered Mystique and had her leave the mutant cause entirely. Beast, despite being a big part of The Last Stand, as well as Days of Future Past, but in the past, was absent in the future, because Kelsey Grammer was shooting Transformers: Age of Extinction when this movie was shooting. Other characters who were established, like Angel and Rogue, either died offscreen or were in an alternate cut of the movie, alive and less than well, like Rogue.

5. The Time Period it focused on

This one is pretty straightforward. The comics didn’t have the same issues as the live action movies. The comics weren’t focusing on prequels for whatever weird reason there was. They only kept moving forward. Prequel stories were told only once in a while, but the movies seemed to be only making those until they realized that there were too many continuity errors. They then decided to semi-reboot the series with Days of Future Past. That would mean using time travel to go back to the past to change the present and the future. The comics set their story in the present time period of their publication: 1983. It made the most sense for them to do that. The movies skipped ahead in time. The movie, made in 2014, was set in 2023, and the past that they travelled to was 1973. They could have made it 1983 like when the comic was made, but they wanted it to be linked to the Vietnam War. See? It wasn’t just a random decade hop.

Comic to movie adaptations are never going to be perfect. They will always have limitations set up by a variety of things, as seen in this article. Either way, there are still good and bad adaptations, and thankfully, this movie didn’t fall in the latter category and actually became the best entry in the X-Men films saga. Logan doesn’t necessarily count, since it’s in the Wolverine trilogy. We’re talking about X-Men films exclusively. Given all the core differences it has with the comics, it is still a good entry.

Do you agree with our list? Is there something we missed? Let us know in the comments below.