Time Travel From X-Men: Days of Future Past Explained

Due to recent issues, screenwriter Simon Kinberg was the one tasked to present the X-Men: Days of Future Past panel at WonderCon. The screenwriter showed an extended version of the previously released clip from the opening battle with the sentinels.

Crave Online managed to talk with the screenwriter, who said (among other things) that Josh Tranks Fantastic Four reboot will be "much more grounded, gritty, realistic" than the previous movies. Kinberg also explained the rules of time travel in X-Men: Days of Future Past.

"Wolverine is now the one who goes back in time. How does Professor X meet himself, as we see James McAvoy and Patrick Stewart face off in the trailer?

I don’t think I can tell you that. Partly, the same mechanism that allows Wolverine’s consciousness to go back in time is the same mechanism that would allow McAvoy’s consciousness to go forward in time.

Are there no Timecop rules where if they touch they turn into a gelatinous blob?

[Laughs] No, there’s no Timecop rules like that but we do have pretty meticulous, strident time travel rules. You’ll see at the beginning of the movie, we take quite a bit of time to set up what the rules are of going back in time because we were all very concerned and preoccupied in the neurotic way about the butterfly effect. So both we didn’t want to be untrue to if something serious happens in the past it’s going to actually have an impact on the future, but the consequence of that is in order to hold onto the logic of the way that our film starts in the future, we would have to have the things in the past be minor events. We didn’t want them to be minor events. We wanted them to be able to spill out into the public consciousness into the ‘70s. So we created a set of rules that sort of bifurcate the past and future.

I always thought the Timecop rules were bullshit anyway.

[Laughs]

What was James Cameron’s advice?

It was just really about making sure that we took the time paradoxes seriously. Really, that was the primary thing. We did at ton of research on time travel paradoxes, and there’s some movies that ignore them and there’s some movies where you never cut back to the future. So a movie like Back to the Future, you don’t really know what the impact on the future is until you really go back there. It’s a lot easier to tell that story than a story where you’re intercutting between the two periods, which is what we do in the movie. We have cuts to the future in the movie and there’s no impact on the people in the future. He talked with Bryan, he just was really focused on wanting to honor the paradoxes.

Could that mean we cut back to different futures each time?

No, we create a rule that would preclude that."

Starring James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellan), Hugh Jackman, Halle Berry, Ellen Page, Shawn Ashmore, Omar Sy, Adan Canto, Daniel Cudmore, Booboo Stewart, Fan Bingbing, Nicholas Hoult, Peter Dinklage, Josh Helman, Evan Jonigkeit, Lucas Till and Evan Peters, X-Men: Days of Future Past opens on May 23rd.

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