Summary In the modern age of movies in which franchises are the hottest way to keep audiences engaged, many sequels and prequels have put forth some incredibly controversial retcons. A "retcon" refers to any continuous story that goes back on a certain detail, essentially undoing a change in the narrative with some far-out explanation. These can be anything from character deaths that turn out to be fake to changes in the chronology of a film series.
10 Somehow, Palpatine Has Returned Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker With just four words, the Star Wars franchise managed to utterly annihilate any good will the sequel series had accrued. After the mixed responses of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Disney decided to heavily course-correct by returning to wade in elements from the original trilogy. Most painfully, the return of the infamous Sith Villain Palpatine, a.k.a.
It turns out that supervillain mastermind behind the titular evil organization, Blofeld, was actually James Bond's long-lost foster brother, Franz Oberhauser. Not only that, but every villain in the Daniel Craig Bond series could be traced back to Spectre's influence, essentially undermining the franchise's previous threats in order to make Blofeld seem more sinister.
Previously considered to be the key to human survival after the robot apocalypse, John Connor is essentially the living MacGuffin of the Terminator universe. However, Terminator: Genysis has him morph into an advanced new species of Terminator android, completely making the importance of his survival in past films a moot point.
HIghlander II: The Quickening evaporates all the established lore of the previous film with a heavy hand, explaining that the immortals are actually aliens from another planet known as Zestians. The prize they fight so viciously over is also changed from being simple mortality to a choice between swift execution and a slow death, making for an even harder to understand motivation for battle.