Broad Strokes / Film

• Prior to Disney's acquisition of the franchise, the Star Wars Canon was built on this, with varying degrees of "Priority". Their canon was split up into segments with the theatrical films at the top level. Those who neither love nor loathe the Star Wars prequel trilogy tend to find that this is the best way to regard it. It's been said of the Star Wars Expanded Universe that every bit of media — books, comics, games, the TV shows — is a window into the 'verse, it's just that some windows are clear, some are blurry, and some are downright abstract. Afterwards, this policy was changed. Everything outside the original six theatrical Star Wars films and Star Wars: The Clone Wars was declared part of a separate "Legends" continuity and not canon for the new material. Everything produced from April 25, 2014 onward in any media is now considered fully canon with no priority levels. Writers are free to re-canonize any "Legends" material they see fit, so long as doing so doesn't contradict any of the installments in the Canon.
  • However, a sliding scale of canonity has returned, at least to some degree. Star Wars: Visions is fully non-canon, while the Lego Star Wars projects like The LEGO Star Wars Holiday Special and Lego Star Wars: The Freemaker Adventures are stated to being "canon adjacent" rather than accurate depictions of what "really" happens. Then there are the continuity differences, such as Cobb Vanth's origins varying a bit between his appearances in Star Wars: Aftermath and The Mandalorian, and the The Last Jedi contradicting aspects of the novelization of The Force Awakens. Basically, the anime stuff is non-canon unless stated otherwise, the Lego-stuff is semi-canon, and comics/books are fully canon unless contradicted by a film or TV series.
  • The Rise of Skywalker begins by mentioning in its Opening Crawl a message Palpatine sent throughout the galaxy announcing his return. This was a reference to an event that happened in Fortnite used to promote the film.
• The Marvel Cinematic Universe has done this with its various incarnations of the Hulk. The Incredible Hulk (2008) is mostly a Continuity Reboot of Hulk, Edward Norton taking over the title role for Eric Bana, but it keeps details of the first film in broad strokes, such as starting out in South America, where The Tag of the first film left off. The Avengers (2012) does the same thing to The Incredible Hulk, replacing Norton with Mark Ruffalo but making references to some of the plot points of that film, such as "breaking Harlem." Further installments of the MCU films make more references to The Incredible Hulk, such as bringing back William Hurt as General Ross and showing a picture of Liv Tyler as Betty Ross. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings and the She-Hulk: Attorney at Law series also bring Tim Roth back as Abomination.
• James Bond:
  • When Timothy Dalton took over the role of Bond: as he was about twenty years younger than Roger Moore, the events of the previous films (which had all been quite consistent up to then) were acknowledged to be canon in Broad Strokes but assumed to have occurred more recently than the 1960s.
  • Casino Royale (2006) was a clear reboot of the James Bond film series, even providing an Origin Story. But it accepted Judi Dench's M and her uneasy relationship with Bond, both features of the Pierce Brosnan Bond movies. Broad strokes of the Pierce Brosnan era's political landscape also remained ("oh, the Americans are going to be unhappy that we beat them to this!").
• The Terminator franchise have a good number of sequels and spin-offs that don't quite align with each other. But since Time Travel is a major plot instigator, this is embraced as part of the Timey-Wimey Ball and each new story just does its own thing while lightly implying events of previous films. Exact dates for Judgement Day have changed, along with the actors, and other events both happen and not happen. More specifically:
  • Terminator Salvation takes a broad strokes approach to the third movie, seen as Fanon Discontinuity to many, with the only clear reference to it being that Kate ended up as Connor's wife and the Terminator fuel cells. Even still, there weren't any explicit references to Terminator 2: Judgment Day (except the Guns N' Roses song). The impression was that it was meant to be that you could watch the original The Terminator and then this movie without any gaps.
  • You can look at the movies as various timelines surrounding the events of the Skynet takeover and the life of John Connor. The idea is that every time a person or a Terminator is sent back in time, the resulting timeline is slightly different, and each movie could be a glimpse at one of the timelines. Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles hints at this idea, with characters from the future who knew each other in the future finding that the memories of one character before they traveled to the past are not consistent with the memories of another character.
  • Terminator Genisys also takes the TV show's approach of differing timelines, starting from the events of the original and taking a wild tangent from there (though elements of the second one, such as the T-1000, still show up, and "Pops" basically becomes the T-X from the third after he Came Back Strong from the Final Battle). This is was made clear by the fact that the meeting between John Connor and Kyle Reese was completely different from the one in Salvation.
• The CGI TMNT was shown as a tentative continuation of the film series by New Line Cinema, but adapted elements of many other sources into its narrative, such as Karai's existence with the Foot Clan and April not being a news reporter. They even had a few continuity nods that only serve to make things stressful for fans. Word of God is that it's indeed meant to be a sequel to the live-action film series.
• Evil Dead:
  • Evil Dead 2 was supposed to start with a recap of the first movie but Sam Raimi couldn't get copyrights to show footage and the other actors wouldn't come back, so it quickly retells the first movie with just Ash and Linda instead of a gang of friends.
  • Some other things get retconned such as the cabin being rented to them being changed to them illegally squatting, which leads to the owner's daughter showing up and thinking Ash killed her parents.
  • Army of Darkness begins with a recap of the second film but Ret Cons the ending of Ash immediately killing Deadites in the medieval era and being hailed as a hero to him appearing in the aftermath of a battle and being carted off in chains, mistaken for a member of the losing side.
• According to Rocky Balboa, the sixth Rocky film, Rocky did retire from boxing due to a suspected brain injury, but by modern standards he was completely able to fight; he never asked for a second opinion because Adrian didn't want him to fight anymore. Everything else in Rocky V didn't happen.
• In Hammer Horror, The Evil of Frankenstein follows the general events of The Curse of Frankenstein and The Revenge of Frankenstein (Frankenstein has created monsters and has been outcast from society for it) but changes several details like the method he used to make them and how the first monster died.
• The original Highlander ended in a way that didn't really allow for sequels. "There can be only one," said the tagline, and the movie ends with only one Immortal. Highlander II: The Quickening gets around this by bringing in other Immortals from another planet, and Highlander III: The Sorcerer (which completely ignores Highlander II) uses Sealed Evil in a Can. The rest of the films (which follow the TV series) accept the original film in broad strokes except for its ending.
• A Nightmare on Elm Street:
  • A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge was poorly received upon release, and is still considered by many fans to be the worst film in the series — leading to future films largely ignoring its events. Despite this, a few elements introduced in that film (like Freddy having the ability to possess the bodies of his victims, and his nickname being "The Springwood Slasher") do appear in later installments, and the third film A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors tacitly acknowledge its timeline (Freddy's Revenge is set five years after the original, while Dream Warriors is set six years after). Scenes from it are also used in the montages featured in Freddy's Dead and Freddy vs. Jason.
  • A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors and the subsequent sequels were perhaps written with the trope deliberately in mind. They don't really mention anything that happened in Freddy's Revenge (although the fact of Nancy being committed does figure into the proceedings in Dream Warriors) and yet they don't really contradict any of it either, and when in Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare Freddy says, "First they tried burning me...then they tried burying me...They even tried holy water!" this exact wording allows for "burning" part to refer either to Freddy's Revenge or to Nancy trying to burn him in the first film, or to his original death by burning when he was still human.
  • Wes Craven's New Nightmare: The Nightmare on Elm Street franchise is subtly implied to be similar but different from the real-world films. There are six films, the sixth of which killed off Freddy, and Heather only appeared as Nancy in the first and third ones. However, it's implied that Nancy never died in the In-Universe movies. New Line Cinema wants Heather to come back for the seventh movie, and her reaction doesn't imply that this would conflict with the third movie. An interviewer also describes all five sequels to the original movie as popular, while several of the real-world sequels received negative reviews.
• Freddy vs. Jason takes this approach to both franchise's canons to make the match-up between its two villains possible. For Nightmare, Springwood was basically destroyed by the chronologically last movie and Freddy killed off (New Nightmare doesn't count as it's a Real-World Episode plot). For Friday, Jason was either dragged off to hell after his body was blown up by the FBI or he was kept and cryogenically frozen and wound up in space. Instead, Springwood found a way to block off Freddy's access to their kids by shutting the whole thing up and Jason is buried somewhere in the woods around Camp Crystal Lake after his last outing (?). Also, Lori's house is implied to be the same house that Nancy lived in, and her mother was killed in a similar way to Nancy's mom, so the implication is that Lori and her friends were the first generation of teens previously affected by Freddy.
• The plot of Masters of the Universe is kicked off when Skeletor and his evil forces "finally" capture Castle Grayskull and the Sorceress, implying that the film was intended to be a live-action continuation of Filmation's animated series (which had just recently ended at the time). Despite this, there are numerous differences between the film and the series (most notably: He-Man isn't an alter ego assumed by Prince Adam of Eternia, and mainstay characters like Cringer and Orko are nowhere to be seen), suggesting that they aren't set in exactly the same continuity.
• Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan: Somebody asked Meyer how they would explain the new uniforms, and he said "We don't. The other film doesn't exist." Military services do change their uniforms, but in the end it came as an ultimatum from the cast who hated the over-engineered costumes of the previous film. The bridge design also changed dramatically, enough that it involves speculation that Starfleet ships come with a modulator bridge system and can just switch one out for a new one. Conveniently enough, this appears very plausible when examining the physical models of the ships.
• Silent Hill: Revelation 3D takes this approach to the plot of the first movie in an attempt to bring its own story closer to the game series. There are references, connections, and even flashbacks to the first film's events, and a handful of returning characters, but numerous important plot details are changed or ignored. For example:
  • The evil cult's beliefs, symbols, and motives are completely changed from the first film to match the game cult.
  • The ending of the first movie is essentially ignored; Sharon and Dark Alessa are not merged, Rose is still in Silent Hill instead of at home, much (perhaps most) of the cult is still alive even though it was strongly implied they had all been massacred.
  • The main character's age is changed (the movie is set years later, but her change in age from the first film does not match the time span between the movies).
• X-Men Film Series
  • X-Men: First Class was supposed to be a Continuity Reboot, but the writers didn't want to go all the way, ultimately making it this trope.
  • X-Men Origins: Wolverine is mostly treated as Canon Discontinuity in The Wolverine (for starters, the opening has Logan in World War II alone instead of accompanied by half-brother Sabretooth), except for some Continuity Nods.
  • X-Men: Days of Future Past explicitly contradicts elements from X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and Word of God is that they were simply treating the movie as Canon Discontinuity. Despite this, a brief Flashback to the events of the film (Sabretooth crushing Logan's bone claws) is seen when the young Xavier reads Logan's mind. This presumably means at least some of that movie still happened.
  • X-Men Origins: Wolverine is treated as this in Deadpool (2016). The two movies clearly take place in separate continuities, but there are also enough obvious parallels between the two of them that it can be assumed that at least some of the events of X-Men Origins still happened in Deadpool's past. Deadpool is still played by Ryan Reynolds, he definitely lives in the same universe as the X-Men, he has definitely met Wolverine, he has enough of a history with the X-Men that he's been invited to join the team numerous times, and he spent several years performing covert operations for a Special Forces team prior to the events of the movie. Deadpool definitely never had his mouth sewed shut by Weapon X, but he could conceivably have served with Wolverine and the rest of Team X during his time in the Special Forces. Note that the superhuman training program in Deadpool is never explicitly called "Weapon X,"^note  Though a few writers and cast members have called it that in interviews so it technically doesn't contradict the detail about Deadpool first being recruited into Weapon X in the 1970s.
    • Deadpool 2 at the end has a montage at the end where Deadpool goes back in time to fix things, including shooting the X-Men Origins Deadpool. He also shoots Ryan Reynolds reading the script for Green Lantern, so it is best to say Deadpool uses continuity as a suggestion or a source of gags rather than anything that makes sense.
  • Logan still picks up some things from Origins — Wolverine's driver license has the name James Howlett, one of the mutants of the X-23 project has powers drawn from Chris Bradley's DNA, and an adamantium bullet is featured again — and downright reinterprets one of its elements with X-24, a Logan clone that deeply resembles that movie's Sabretooth.
• G.I. Joe: Retaliation, while keeping the basic ending of the previous film G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (which ended with Zartan impersonating the President of the United States and Cobra Commander and Destro being captured) omits many characters from the previous film without any explanation, changes the Joes from a multinational team into a solely US-based one, and overall removes many of the fantastical elements of the previous films, and overall has a more realistic feel.
• Mad Max: Fury Road shares the same basic concept and setting of the first three films—it's After the End in Australia, Max is a former cop, and his family were murdered—but according to Word of God is not in exactly the same continuity as them. If you've seen the original movies, the discrepancies are pretty obvious: Max still has his V-8 Interceptor in the opening scene (he lost it in The Road Warrior, and it was supposedly the last of its kind), there are apparently multiple flourishing post-apocalyptic civilizations in Australia (the original Mad Max took place Just Before the End), and Max's deceased child was apparently a young girl rather than an infant boy. The idea is that the whole series is in-universe folklore, written long after his real deeds have passed into legend.
• Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie coexists somewhat loosely with the web series.
  • The series sometimes breaks the fourth wall and acknowledges that the "Nerd" is just James Rolfe playing a character he can step away from, but the movie makes it clear that the Nerd is always the Nerd, on- and off-camera.
  • After years of fan demand, the show hinted that the Nerd was going to finally review the infamous E.T. on Atari 2600, but for copyright reasons, a generic stand-in called Eee Tee had to be used instead. When the review segment was later re-edited as a normal episode, the real E.T. game was swapped back in, with no in-universe explanation for the change.
  • Elements of the movie such as the Nerd's day job at a modern game store and his friend/coworker Cooper are never alluded to in the series, creating two subtly different interpretations of the Nerd as a character.
• Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie was deliberately conceived as taking place in an Alternate Continuity from the original Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers TV show, with the events of its story later being "replaced" in the timeline by Season 3's "Ninja Quest" storyline: the Rangers get their ninja powers from Dulcea of Phaedos in the movie after having their original powers taken by Ivan Ooze, while they get them from Ninjor in the show after having them taken by Rito Revolto. Also, this being a big-budget movie, their suits look completely different (they're bulky, contoured latex rather than tight, sleek spandex). Tommy is also implied to have been an original Ranger rather than a Sixth Ranger, and Rita and Zedd's forces are completely overhauled (Squat, Babboo, and Finster are nowhere to be seen, and they include a Canon Foreigner named Mordant). Despite most of the characters and cast of the show being in the movie, it's effectively based on the show rather than being a direct continuation.
• Dirty Laundry is this mixed with Loose Canon and Writing Around Trademarks. The story is clearly about The Punisher, but the details are deliberately left very vague, allowing it to be slotted into any continuity or left as it's own universe. For example, the Punisher is played by Thomas Jane who played the character in the 2004 adaptation, so it could be a sequel to that film but no references are made to any events from it. The backstory is thin and ambiguous; Punisher is living in his van after his last adventure went sideways and he's doing some laundry before he gets to work on finding a new hideout. That's all we're told.
• Guest House Paradiso is loosely based on the TV series Bottom. The main characters have different last names, somehow recovered from being killed by machine gunfire in the final episode and now run a hotel.
• At first, Bumblebee seems to be straight prequel to Transformers (2007) but it ends with Optimus Prime and the Autobots arriving on Earth shortly afterwards, instead of Bumblebee calling them only twenty years later. Hence, it picked up elements from the original movies - Bumblebee unable to talk and eventually becoming a Camaro, Sector 7, Megatron's absence - but is a whole new continuity.
• The Return of the Living Dead: As the film was more or less an unauthorized sequel to Night of the Living Dead by John Russo, who co-wrote that film with George A. Romero before they ended their partnership, the film gets around this by the characters saying that the movie Night of the Living Dead was based on a true story but that the film got some of the details incorrect.
• Having gone through so many Continuity Reboots, the Godzilla films have periodically gone through this in regards to the events of the first film and Godzilla's origins.
  • Godzilla vs. Megaguirus says that the ending of the 1954 film didn't happen; Godzilla just walked off into the ocean on his own after Tokyo was completely razed (leading the Japanese government to move the country's capital to Osaka), and continued to menace Japan for years afterward.
  • Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla states that most the 1954 film happened except for the part where Godzilla's body was completely destroyed by the Oxygen Destroyer. His skeleton survived, allowing it to become the framework of the cybernetic Mechagodzilla. The film's timeline also includes many of the non-Godzilla kaiju films produced in the Showa era, with events corresponding to release years, though Gorath stands out as it was set 20 Minutes into the Future and has the moon being destroyed, presumably meaning only the kaiju attack happened.
  • Godzilla: Final Wars suggests that Godzilla wasn't killed in 1954, but was buried in ice in Antarctica in a fight with the Gotengo some undefined time afterwards.
  • Godzilla (2014) has Godzilla first awakening in 1954, but remained publicly unknown for another sixty years and never having the chance to attack Tokyo before he was nuked back into dormancy.
  • Godzilla was originally defined as being some sort of unknown prehistoric amphibious reptile that was mutated by nuclear energy. The Heisei series more clearly defined him as being a mutated "Godzillasaurus", a tyrannosaur-like dinosaur that somehow survived extinction. Godzilla (1998) did away with a prehistoric origin, but retained the nuclear mutation and reptilian parts (from an ordinary iguana). The Monsterverse reestablished Godzilla as a prehistoric amphibious reptile, but while still nuclear, he's not mutated this time. Shin Godzilla meanwhile again has him as a prehistoric amphibious organism mutated by radiation, but from some kind of fish-like animal this time.
• 2011's Jurassic Park: The Game fit in somewhat well with the movies (outside of an Age Lifted main character), which at that point was up to Jurassic Park III with a fourth movie stuck in Development Hell. But then Jurassic World finally released and would contradict several elements of the aforementioned game. Things got more interesting when Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom has Isla Nublar suffer a volcanic eruption, with the volcano bearing same name as in the video game. Then, the Barbasol can MacGuffin that was shown destroyed in the game was found in Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous and is shown in the possession of Lewis Dodgson in Jurassic World Dominion, further calling things into question. When asked about it, writer-director Colin Trevorrow said it was done on purpose, saying that a version of the game's story did happen in the movies, but not the same one.
  • The television series Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous is largely regarded as canon but depicts some events from the films in a slightly altered way, which has led fans to suggest that the kids may be Unreliable Narrator's.
• The Suicide Squad is a Soft Reboot that replaces most of the cast of Suicide Squad (2016), but it does make a handful of references to it: Viola Davis, Joel Kinnaman, Margot Robbie, and Jai Courtney return as Amanda Waller, Rick Flag, Harley Quinn, and Captain Boomerang, and the film acknowledges that Harley and Boomerang previously served in a different supervillain black ops team run by Waller and supervised by Flag. Harley's own movie Birds of Prey (2020) likewise only had a few Continuity Nods to Suicide Squad. James Gunn has since said that the film isn't part of the new DC Universe live action continuity starting in 2024, but that the history of that setting will include a "rough memory" of this, Blue Beetle (2023) and Peacemaker (2022) season 1.
• Due to the lukewarm reception of Inspector Gadget (1999), Inspector Gadget 2 took steps to distance itself from its predecessor. Dr. Brenda Bradford catches Chuck Cunningham Syndrome^note Though she was mentioned in an early animatic and Gadget and Claw were altered to be more like their cartoon counterparts: their civilian names (John Brown and Sanford Scolex respectively) are dropped, Gadget is more bumbling and Claw speaks with a deep, gravelly voice while wearing a wide-brimmed hat that keeps his face obscured from viewers. Aside from vague mentions of Gadget having previously arrested Claw, none of the events of the first film are mentioned and some details even contradict the 1999 film (such as Brick and McKibble saying they've worked for Claw in the past despite not appearing in the first film).
• Sony Pictures adapting the Millennium Series went from the first to the fourth book in The Girl in the Spider's Web, a Soft Reboot that could serve as a direct sequel - even if there are mentions to Lisbeth's father Zalanchenko dying and Mikael Blomkvist writing an expose about him, implying the second and third novels still happened.
• Catwoman (2004) with Halle Berry features a new Catwoman named "Patience Phillips" in the lead role instead of Selina Kyle, it doesn't take place in Gotham City, and it makes no reference to any characters from the Batman comics other than Catwoman herself. But it does notably establish that the film's version of Catwoman is a Legacy Character who gets chosen for the role by a "cat goddess", and that there have been numerous "Catwomen" throughout history. During the exposition scene where all of this is laid out, Patience's mentor shows her pictures of previous Catwomen—and one of the pictures is of Michelle Pfeiffer in Batman Returns, hinting that the film takes place in the same universe as Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher's Batman films (even if it doesn't reference any of their events).

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