X-Men: Days of Future PastSave

We open in a dystopian 2023 future. Sentinels — autonomous mutant-hunting robots originally designed by Bolivar Trask in the 1970s — have wiped out most of mutant-kind and most of mutant-sympathetic humans alongside them. The surviving X-Men — Professor X, Magneto, Wolverine, Storm, Iceman, Blink, Kitty Pryde — have been hiding in a Chinese mountain monastery, leaping ahead of Sentinel attacks via Kitty's emerging time-projection abilities. They cannot win the war directly. They need to prevent it from ever starting.

Kitty Pryde discovers her power can project a consciousness back in time. She sends Wolverine's consciousness back 50 years to 1973 — into his younger body, before he received his adamantium claws. Wolverine arrives in 1973 hungover in a Brooklyn apartment with a Mafia girlfriend. His mission: find the younger Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) and younger Magneto (Michael Fassbender), get them to work together, and prevent Mystique from assassinating Bolivar Trask — the murder that triggered the Sentinel program's funding.

Wolverine finds 1973 Charles Xavier living in seclusion in his abandoned mansion. Charles is depressed, addicted to a serum that suppresses his telepathic powers (and his mutation), and bitter about the loss of Erik and Mystique. Wolverine recruits a young Hank McCoy / Beast (Nicholas Hoult) to help break Charles out of his stupor. They retrieve Magneto from the Pentagon — where he has been imprisoned for the JFK assassination (the film implies he was framed).

The team travels to Paris, where Trask is showcasing his Sentinel prototype to Vietnamese government officials. Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) — Charles's old sister — is already there, planning to assassinate Trask. Charles confronts her in a sequence that's pure family melodrama. He pleads with her to stop. The intervention partially succeeds; she retreats. But Trask, having seen her shapeshifting abilities, captures a sample of her DNA — which becomes the genetic basis for the Sentinels' adaptive shape-mimicking abilities.

The team races to Washington D.C. for Trask's senate hearing. Magneto, having decided peaceful collaboration with humans is a fool's errand, hijacks the Sentinel prototype and uses it to attack the White House. Charles and Mystique stop him. Mystique chooses, in the final moment, to spare Trask — a deliberate inversion of her future-self's decision. The Sentinel program loses its political momentum.

Wolverine wakes up in his original 2023 body. The future has rewritten itself: the dystopian timeline never happens. The Sentinel war was prevented. Jean Grey is alive. Cyclops is alive. The X-Men live in a recovered future Xavier mansion. Wolverine is briefly disoriented before remembering the new continuity.

X-Men: Days of Future Past grossed $748 million globally — the highest-grossing X-Men film at the time of release. Critics widely praised its time-travel structure and the integration of both casts. The film also retroactively erased The Last Stand (2006)'s controversial character deaths from continuity. Bryan Singer's direction was widely celebrated until his subsequent legal issues led to his exit from the franchise after this film.