The 10 Most Confusing Movie Franchise Timelines

We know we don’t need to be the ones to tell you this, but it’s important to watch lengthy movie series in the right order. You don’t want to skip any, because you might miss an important plot detail or character introduction that will become crucial to the later storylines. Usually that’s pretty simple: just watch them in the order in which they came out, whether in theaters or on streaming or direct-to-video or however you can find them. It’s easy enough when they’re numbered — everyone knows how to watch the Harry Potter movies or the Mission: Impossibles in chronological order. They were filmed that way!

But that’s not necessarily the case for every media franchise, whose entries were not necessarily planned out in advance, or meant to take place one right after the other. You can certainly watch them that way, but for those of us who prefer to follow the rules of time, we have to find a more temporally accurate chronology. Some of the most famous film series with the most dedicated fans are an absolute mess of sequels, prequels, and midquels that require some dedication to sort out. So we did all the heavy lifting for you.

We’ve highlighted ten of the biggest film franchises with the most overly complicated timelines, movie series that may have started out making sense but lost track of the timeline along the way, or even abandoned it altogether. These film series range from trilogies with a couple of misplaced later sequels to entire franchises that are constantly retconning themselves. We’ve done our best to explain how they all fit together, and provide the accurate viewing order when required. The rest is up to you.