X-Men: Days of Future PastSave

The film opens in a dystopian 2023. Sentinels — massive shape-shifting robots designed to identify and exterminate mutants — have systematically hunted nearly all of mutantkind to extinction. Ordinary humans suspected of carrying the mutant gene are also being eliminated. The Sentinels have been engineered to adapt to any mutant power. The remaining X-Men, including Charles Xavier, Magneto, Storm, Wolverine, Iceman, Bishop, Sunspot, Blink, Warpath, and Kitty Pryde, have been hiding in a Chinese monastery. Kitty has discovered a way to use her phasing powers to send a person's consciousness backward in time into their younger body, allowing them to alter the past. Their plan: send someone back to 1973 to prevent the assassination that triggered the Sentinel program.

The assassination in question was the killing of military scientist Bolivar Trask by Mystique. Trask had been developing the Sentinel program; his death convinced the U.S. government to fund and accelerate it. Mystique was captured at the assassination scene, her DNA was harvested, and her shape-shifting genome was used to create the Sentinels' adaptable architecture. To prevent this future, someone must travel back fifty years and stop Mystique. Only Wolverine has a healing factor capable of withstanding the months-long mental disruption such a deep time-travel would require. He volunteers. Kitty sends Logan's consciousness back to his 1973 body in a New York hotel.

Logan wakes in 1973 in bed beside an unfamiliar woman. He immediately travels to the X-Mansion to find Charles Xavier — but the 1973 Charles is broken. Following the events of First Class twelve years earlier, the school has closed. Most of his X-Men have died in the Vietnam War or have abandoned him. Charles has been taking a serum developed by Hank McCoy that suppresses his mutation in exchange for restoring the use of his legs. He is severely depressed, drinking heavily, and unwilling to act. Logan persuades him to help by relaying a telepathic message from the future Charles. The two of them, with Hank, plan to recruit Magneto, who has been imprisoned in a special concrete cell beneath the Pentagon for ten years following his alleged role in the Kennedy assassination.

The Pentagon prison-break sequence is the film's most-quoted setpiece. The team needs a high-speed mutant to extract Magneto. They recruit Peter Maximoff — Quicksilver — a teenage runaway with super-speed who lives in his mother's basement. Quicksilver infiltrates the Pentagon kitchen, where Logan, Charles, and Hank are pretending to be government inspectors. He breaks Magneto out of the cell during a single ten-second sequence in which the surrounding world appears frozen — Quicksilver redirects flying bullets, repositions guards, and rearranges the kitchen contents in a precisely choreographed ballet set to Jim Croce's "Time in a Bottle." The sequence became one of the most-discussed superhero moments of its decade.

The team flies to Paris, where Mystique is preparing to assassinate Trask at the Paris Peace Accords negotiations. They confront her at the moment of the kill. Magneto, whose own ideology has hardened during his decade in solitary confinement, attempts to kill Mystique himself rather than risk her capture. The fight reveals their faction split: Charles, Logan, and Hank want to convince Mystique to abandon the assassination through emotional appeal; Magneto wants to kill her preemptively. Mystique escapes wounded after Magneto puts a bullet in her leg. The U.S. government, having witnessed the public confrontation, decides to immediately authorize Trask's Sentinel program, accelerating the very catastrophe Logan was sent to prevent.

Magneto, recovering his old anger and seeing the Sentinels as proof of his worldview, hijacks the program. He intercepts the Sentinels at their Washington D.C. unveiling ceremony, infuses them with his magnetic control, and turns them on the assembled U.S. President Nixon and his cabinet. Charles, Logan, Hank, and Mystique converge on the unveiling event. Magneto raises a section of RFK Stadium and physically positions it around the White House as a barricade. Mystique, disguised as a Secret Service agent, infiltrates the President's bunker. She prepares to kill Nixon — completing the assassination Magneto has reframed as a public statement. Charles telepathically reaches her through the bunker's walls. He pleads with her to make a different choice than the one she had been on the brink of fifty years earlier.

Mystique chooses mercy. She lowers her weapon. The assembled cameras capture her saving the President's life in front of the world. Trask is arrested for selling Sentinel technology to foreign governments. The Sentinel program is shelved. The future timeline begins to dissolve. In the 2023 dystopian present, the surviving X-Men in the Chinese monastery are ambushed by Sentinels just as the timeline shift completes; Charles, Magneto, Storm, and the rest of the future team are vaporized in the moment before the new reality replaces them. Logan's consciousness is yanked back into his 1973 body, then briefly into the river he had been thrown into earlier in the film, then forward again into a new restored 2023.

Logan wakes at the X-Mansion in the new timeline. The school is restored. Storm is teaching. Iceman and Rogue are still students. Beast is a teacher. Cyclops — alive, having never died at Alkali Lake — walks past in a corridor. Jean Grey — also alive, having never become Phoenix — greets Logan with surprise at his appearance. Charles, in his original wheelchair (the new timeline's Sentinel-free reality has restored him to his proper form), greets him warmly. Logan does not recognize this restored future. He had grown up in a different reality and now must reconcile his memories with a world he had never lived in. Charles tells him the school's history: a different past has been written.

X-Men: Days of Future Past grossed $748 million globally — the highest-grossing X-Men film at the time. Critically, it was widely praised as one of the strongest entries in the franchise. Bryan Singer's return after a decade away gave the film cohesion the Brett Ratner-era films had lacked. The Quicksilver kitchen sequence has been routinely cited as one of the most innovative superhero set-pieces of the 21st century. The film's most consequential effect was structural: the time-travel mechanic canonically erased the events of X-Men: The Last Stand and X-Men Origins: Wolverine from the franchise timeline, restoring Cyclops, Jean Grey, and Charles Xavier and freeing the franchise to continue with the prequel-cast (First Class, Apocalypse, Dark Phoenix) without contradicting the older films. The post-credits scene introduced En Sabah Nur — Apocalypse — laying foundation for the next film's antagonist.