Fanon Discontinuity/Film

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
"There's a reason so many people don't believe this movie exists. Because quite frankly we don't want to believe it exists. It's so horrible that we as human beings don't want to believe that we created it."
—The Nostalgia Critic; Titanic, the Animated Musical
[Star Trek fans] need to do what us Highlander fans and a great majority of Star Wars fans do: If you don't like it, get angry over it for a very brief period of time, then go into a severe drinking fit, and then pretend the sequels you don't like don't exist! ... It's called selective amnesia, and it works wonders for nerds.
—Noah Antwiler on Trekkie reactions to the 2009 Star Trek film

Established movie franchises tend to have Fanon Discontinuity imposed on them, especially whenever crappy sequels rear their ugly head.

Note 1: Do not include examples based only in adaptation. A movie adaptation can not be discontinued since it is not part of the continuity of the original. You can discontinue a sequel of the adaptation but not the actual adaptation. To a lesser degree you can discontinue parts of a movie.

Note 2: Ignoring certain works of a person or company so they're "still good" is also forbidden as that would be ignoring real life events (which we are not doing here).

Note 3: Do not post personal examples. Examples should only be of groups of fandoms.

  • Some fans of the Alien films like to think that everything from the second or third movie onward was just a nightmare that Ripley had in hypersleep. Some say that the series ended with Ripley's death in part 3. Others refuse to acknowledge the existence of even that film. The vast remainder are mostly open-minded enough to accept both Alien Cubed and Resurrection, but had horrible nightmares in which two Alien vs. Predator films were made, the first of which was written and directed by Paul "Worthless Shit" Anderson of Mortal Kombat and Resident Evil fame. And some accept only the first AVP, which at least tried to retain the atmosphere of the Alien and Predator series, but reject the second for being squicky without actually being scary. And there are others who like AVP-R but ignore the first AVP film for being a safe PG-13 cheese ball kiddie movie.
  • Many fans prefer to pretend that the second and third Matrix movies never happened. Particularly the third, as it introduced philosophical concepts which just plain didn't make sense and then suddenly dropped them.
    • XKCD says "Damn Straight!" - and provides the page image for Fanon Discontinuity as a whole.
    • In the first film, Neo was a man told that everything he knew was a bunch of raining green data and was thrust into a much more dangerous new world. The audience learned right alongside him, and the smirk he makes in the dojo fight with Morpheus is an example. In Reloaded, Neo has become a Boring Invincible Hero who can kick the asses of 100 Smiths and remains a totally emotionless robot through the whole movie, even when he's making out with Trinity.
    • And when Trilogy Creep hit, The Matrix Resurrections was discarded by those who found it a late and unnecessary extension.
  • A few Star Wars fans hate the Ewoks so much that, nearly three decades later, they still disavow Return of the Jedi as a legitimate episode of the franchise.
    • Don't forget that there are still Luke/Leia shippers out there who disavow pretty much Return of the Jedi in its entirety. Well, maybe not the Jabba's Palace sequence, even if it does score Han/Leia points, but Luke/Leia had an instant Nonstandard Game Over.
    • Fans aren't the only ones who want to pretend Ewoks never existed, as you'll discover when you read just about anything Anthony Daniels (C-3PO) has to say about them.
    • Ask anyone who saw the original trilogy first what they thought of the prequels. You are likely to be punched in the face and informed that there is no such thing, but it's so worth it.
    • A good portion of Star Wars fans ignore the entire Expanded Universe.
      • And now that Disney owns the rights to Star Wars, they agree.
    • Lucas mentioned that his work on Robot Chicken-Star Wars' was his way of apologizing to the fans for anything they don't like about the series. Apology accepted.
    • Star Wars has all kinds of Fanon Discontinuity groups. Some say the Prequels and the Clone Wars movie never happened In-Universe. Others say that only the movies ever happened, and that the Expanded Universe is non-canon. Still others say that nothing after The Empire Strikes Back happened. Then we get into the groups that dis the continuity in regards to certain parts of the Expanded Universe, like the Jedi Prince series, the New Jedi Order series, the Legacy era, and so on.
    • Lucas once said that the Jedi, as seen in the prequels, were allowed to have sex, but weren't allowed to form attachments. Just about everyone has ignored this, from fans to EU creators, for obvious reasons[1]
    • In the Disney era, only Rogue One escapes this, helped by inspiring the beloved Andor. The Force Awakens seemed like a good start, but soon after The Last Jedi came out there were petitions asking for its removal from continuity, and once The Rise of Skywalker came out plenty of fans agreed that the Star Wars story works better by ignoring the Sequel Trilogy. And Solo: A Star Wars Story gets excluded for being considered an underwhelming attempt at an origin story.
  • While we're in George Lucas productions, fans who were frustrated with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (though like the Star Wars prequels, the expectations were really high after 19 years of waiting) try to ignore its existence.
    • There is also the fact that unlike Star Wars, Indy's EU is fairly obscure, so it's no surprise many fans not only don't think of any but the movies as canon... they don't even know about the novels, comics (specially the terrible 80s Marvel comics), park rides, tabletop games and video games. Opinion is perhaps more divided about the prequel TV series, the only non-movie installment that gets some references in fan fiction.
    • Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny was hit even further by this, particularly by those who liked Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and felt it was a better conclusion than following it with a Happy Ending Override to make Indy a sad and bitter old man.
  • Some people also play Fanon Discontinuity on Batman and Robin. It's a different way, though. Batman and Robin gets openly razzed. Batman Forever, being neither like the first two films nor as outrageous as this Ink Stain Adaptation, simply gets ignored.
  • With The Pink Panther films, there are fans who only count the films Peter Sellers was in as canon. Trail of the Pink Panther is an interesting case here, since it was assembled from deleted scenes and flashbacks of Sellers two years after his death. If the film doesn't count on its own, then the deleted scenes can be seen as canon in their original context of material dropped from The Pink Panther Strikes Again. Even MGM/UA has encouraged the Sellers-only approach on occasion; the Pink Panther Film Collection DVD box set from 2004 only included the Sellers films they owned the rights to. (They don't currently own the Return of... rights).
  • Many fans declared that Rocky V never happened, even before Rocky Balboa (mostly) ratified that judgment. Bill Simmons use of the phrase "never happened" might be the Trope Codifier, or, at the very least, one of the more popular uses.
  • Many people wish they had never heard of Home Alone 3, due to the absence of Macaulay Culkin, its mediocre quality, and the lack of genuinely funny villains, or those from Home Alone 4 onwards simply because they suck. A few even wish they hadn't heard of Home Alone 2 because it's similar to the first one, just recycled in some other town.
    • Understandably though, Macaulay Culkin would have been getting older to be able to keep up the part of Kevin by the time of Home Alone 3.
  • Terminator 2 featured a positive ending where John Connor not only survives, but manages to prevent the global nuclear apocalypse that would nearly wipe out humanity from ever happening. Terminator 3, on the other hand, takes a Shoot the Shaggy Dog approach to the previous movie and flat-out states that Judgment Day is inevitable, rendering every action taken in the previous movie a waste of time, including the Heroic Sacrifice of one of the well-intentioned programmers who would have originally brought the apocalypse about. No mention was made that this inevitability renders the entire time traveling kill-your-enemy-before-the-war theme of the series equally pointless. As a result, many fans insist that the series ended after the second movie, or that the more positive The Sarah Connor Chronicles TV series is the only follow-up. Never mind that it was hinted at being inevitable the entire time - John sent his own father back in time, which couldn't happen without a Stable Time Loop, and thus a more or less stable timeline..
    • And then there's the people that refuse to acknowledge even Terminator 2, believing that it screws up things just as badly, if not worse, than everything that came after it.
    • The fourth movie, Terminator Salvation gets some discontinuity because it follows the events of the third movie, changing the focus of the series (future war against the machines instead of the present day).
      • Salvation also gets some discontinuity because it contradicts The Sarah Connor Chronicles, most notably through the absence of any reference to Derek Reese. Some fans who otherwise wouldn't have had an issue with it choose to ignore it simply because keeping it would make it tricky to keep the series in canon as well.
    • The fifth movie, Terminator: Genisys, actually made itself easier to ignore given its Timey Wimey Ball approach relying on alternate timelines.
    • Once Terminator: Dark Fate brought James Cameron back, it was supposed to finally put the franchise on the right course, even discarding the previous three movies! Instead it was a similar target of erasure, with killing John Connor in the opening scene, making the first two movies All for Nothing, being a particularly sore point.
  • Many Star Trek fans avoid any mention (or even thought, as much as possible) of the events in Star Trek V the Final Frontier. The Word of God from Gene Roddenberry himself was that many elements were "apocryphal".
    • Numerous fans also throw out Nemesis, due to (among other things) the appearance of a sister race of the Romulans that had never been featured or mentioned before, the crew acting like they had never met another Soong-type android before, and Data dying even though it could have been easily avoided using other pieces of Treknology. On a lesser scale, fanfic writers Retcon the ending to allow Data to survive through various means (from swapping his mind with B4 to being blown into an Alternate Universe). In fact, the comic book series "Countdown", a lead-in to the new Star Trek movie suggests EXACTLY that Data's neural patterns were downloaded into B4 (the film itself makes the same suggestion, although perhaps not to the same degree).
      • Star Trek: Insurrection is sometimes ignored simply for generally being considered bad, although this is easier as no canon-changing events occurred.
    • And a good number of Kirk fans throw out Star Trek Generations, because they don't think Kirk should have been killed off so ingloriously. Even some TNG fans would rather forget it.
    • Then of course, many fans will ignore JJ Abrams' Star Trek film and its sequels, both for "wiping out" the events of every series other than Enterprise, but also for taking Star Trek from 'vaguely plausible' to 'no idea how physics works in any way' and for perceived dumbing down.
  • A number of Spy Kids fans agree that the less said about the third film, with its poor writing (including an ending which made no sense whatsoever by failing to explain how the virtual reality creations ended up in the real world) and a stupid "3D" gimmick, the better! It doesn't help that it was a Dolled-Up Installment made from a totally unrelated script.
    • Some would also say there wasn't a second film either.
      • And the fourth is possibly the least well-received of the bunch.
  • Some in the Highlander fandom disregards all sequels. It helps that each installment, besides quality problems, ignores events outside the first movie. (The only exceptions: Highlander Endgame is a cross between the first movie's and the TV series' continuity, and the Direct to Video Highlander the Source follows the events of Endgame). Those who enjoy most of the movies will still adamantly ignore Highlander II the Quickening, which has little more than a few names in common with the Highlander universe. Highlander 2 may be the most hated sequel ever made.
    • Other Highlander fans decide to ignore all the films for the sake of a protagonist who KNOWS how to handle a sword - that is, for Highlander the series.
    • In short, there should've been only one.
  • Fans of the The Inheritance Cycle found the live-action movie made from their series so radically inaccurate and generally botched it's become a Running Gag through some of the fandom to "disown" the movie, or simply pretend it doesn't exist.
  • All the sequels to Jaws are disregarded by much of the fandom, in part because of the sharp drop in quality with each entry: the mediocre Jaws 2, the cheap but counterproductive "3D" gimmick in Jaws 3D, and the ridiculous Voodoo Shark concept and horrific execution in Jaws: The Revenge.
  • As far as many fans of the Mission: Impossible TV series are concerned, whatever |those movies were, they certainly did not depict the real IM Force, and that definitely wasn't Jim Phelps. Besides, the films completely ignored the elaborate scams aimed at fooling the bad guys which were the entire raison d'etre for the original series.
  • The Godfather III is widely perceived to be inferior to the first two movies made during the classic New Hollywood era. With a convoluted plot, a love story featuring Kissing Cousins (Mary Corleone and Vincent Mancini), a former main character getting McLeaned (Tom Hagen), and arguably some Badass Decay (Michael Corleone), this sequel alienated a great deal of fans, many of whom prefer to pretend this never happened. Some viewers point out that it's still a decent movie, just not on par with The Godfather I and II. Others use Brain Bleach to forget its existence. In any case, when people refer to the great The Godfather movies, they more often than not mean the first two.
    • Word of God says that the movie was never intended to be on the epic scale of the first two, and in fact the original title was the spoilerific The Death of Michael Corleone before Executive Meddling took over.
      • An ironic reversal of what happened with Part II. The studio were dead set against simply calling it The Godfather Part II -- "Boring! More of the same!"—but Coppola dug in, insisting that it was a continuation of the original movie and not a separate story. Fifteen years later he wants to make The Death of Michael Corleone, and -- "You want to call it what? You're insane! The Godfather is the most acclaimed franchise in cinema, and this is part three!" Cue the crushing disappointment when it turns out to be utterly unlike parts I and II. (Of course, as the original entry points out, there were other problems.)
  • Most people throw out the very end of Dario Argento's Opera, especially because it's a Diabolus Ex Machina.
  • Where to begin with Halloween? Some ignore films 4-6, skipping the Jamie Lloyd story in favor of Laurie Strode. Some pick the first and second films with Halloween: H20 as kind of trilogy, due to their dislike of Halloween Resurrection. Almost everyone ignores Halloween 3. Taking the 2018 Halloween as the one true sequel to the original is possible, but there are those who won't extend the same courtesy to its follow-ups Halloween Kills and Halloween Ends.
  • The ending of Pretty in Pink outraged many, and it is generally ignored in favor of the original ending, which was thrown out because Molly Ringwald, the star of the movie, suggested the new ending. John Hughes was notably displeased with the revised ending.
  • Some X-Men fans, chose to ignore Jean's and Scott's deaths or Rogue taking the Cure in the third movie. Other fans tend to disregard the movie as a whole.
    • And then there are some that prefer to ignore X-Men: Origins: Wolverine, because it was poorly executed and has a lot of continuity errors with the main series. And it turned out to be right. Follow-up The Wolverine took a Broad Strokes approach, and X-Men: Days of Future Past downright excluded it from continuity through a Cosmic Retcon.
    • Everything after Days of Future Past counts in their own ways. X-Men: Apocalypse and Dark Phoenix are ignored for being underwhelming sequels. Deadpool and Deadpool 2 are well-liked, but they play so loose with continuity that many fans don't count them as being proper X-Men movies. And the beloved Logan is such a Bad Future that a contigent considers it a speculative ending for the franchise instead of a rather depressing canon installment.
  • More than a few fans (including Wes Craven himself) prefer to think of the original A Nightmare on Elm Street as ending with the original, more upbeat finale where Freddy is defeated for good and everyone lives
  • Many Muppet fans like to pretend Muppets From Space never happened, not from quality reasons, but for resolving what Gonzo is.
    • Many pretend that every Muppet movie after that (at least until The Muppets) never happened for quality reasons.
  • Invoked in The Nostalgia Critic review of The Neverending Story 2 in which he says it's a good thing there was never another sequel, even though there actually was, before turning on the theme from the movies to drown out the complaints to that effect. He ended up reviewing the third anyway.
    • The Neverending Story 3 is so awful that fans of the original like to pretend that it doesn't exist. It's often placed on Worst Movies of All Time lists.
  • Many (most?) Anne Rice fans pretend there was only ever one Vampire Chronicles movie made, and it was the one in 1994 starring Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise.
  • Many who watched A.I.: Artificial Intelligence feel that the movie should have ended with David at the bottom of the sea in front of the statue of the Blue Fairy and wishing he was a real boy, rather than the overly-sugary last 10 minutes of the movie, which feels awkwardly tacked on in any case.
  • Most fans of Dragonheart agree that there is no sequel.
  • Though technically a sequel to The Rocky Horror Picture Show, being that it takes place after the prior film and even subtly references it a number of times, most fans would rather consider Shock Treatment to be a separate entity entirely. Even series creator Richard O'Brien has claimed that the Brad and Janet of that film are not the same characters previously seen in RHPS - which is more or less universally accepted, due to their vastly different physical appearances (Jessica Harper bears absolutely no resemblance to Susan Sarandon) and failure to recognize characters that look *exactly* like the castle inhabitants.
  • Quite a few fans like to pretend that Airplane! II: The Sequel never happened. Not so much for quality reasons as They just prefer to remember Airplane as a standalone classic and aren't big on the absence of the ZAZ team. Those who do admit its inevitably not on par with the original but is very funny on its own.
  • A Good Day to Die Hard was such a terrible attempt at a Die Hard movie that one review of the series' box set stated the attached documentary "doesn’t even recognize its existence (it was produced before). You’d be wise to do the same."
  1. ↑ Partially because it's not as fun writing fanfic if it's just sex, and partially because some people don't like the idea of sex without love, or even a strong "like".
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