Where Does The Gifted Fall In X-Men Continuity?

At least with Marvel Studios, “it’s all connected” – with the X-Men universe, it’s a totally different beast. (Kelsey Grammer or Nicholas Hoult, take your pick)

After X-Men: Days of Future Past, continuity took a wild turn where Cyclops and Storm could be teens in the early 1980’s yet around 25 in the year 2000. That’s not even taking something like X-Men Origins: Wolverine into account. It’s a mess, and it’s mostly just handwaved. It’s a world where Lucas Till’s Havok can look to be in his twenties in 1963, and he will have barely aged in the time since then.

With the upcoming FOX TV series The Gifted, one might wonder where the show will fit into the overall X-Men continuity. At this moment, no connection to the movies has been explicitly made, except for that the X-Men sound like an urban legend or like they’re at least not around or public anymore. If The Gifted and the X-Men films are in the same universe, it should mean that, at the very least, X-Men and X2: X-Men United probably happened over a decade ago; X-Men: Apocalypse and that sort of thing are now decades old. Since the cars appear to be from the present day, we’re assuming it’s not as far in the future as the Logan film. A more explicit connection — say, Stephen Moyer’s real-life wife Anna Paquin showing up as Rogue, or Hugh Jackman coming out of his Logan retirement to appear on The Gifted for sweeps — would make things a lot clearer.

It could be that The Gifted is a thing of its own, like the Deadpool movies, which may include X-Men characters but they’re not directly connected to the films’ continuity. Deadpool even handwaves this with his Hugh Jackman “Sexiest Man Alive” magazine, or the reference to “Stewart or McAvoy?” In any event, “how is it connected?” is certainly a question that will be asked this summer at Comic-Con or at the television critics’ press tour.

(And, yes, some Gifted characters like Blink do appear in X-Men: Days of Future Past, but that future was eliminated, so who knows if she will still ever completely adopt that look. It’s still likely that Booboo Stewart’s Warpath could be the brother of Blair Redford’s John Proudstar, as they are brothers in the comics.)

Would you like to see a Gifted-X-Men connection? When do you think it all happened? Leave some comments below or visit our Gifted forum.