this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2025
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I would actually push back on the premise. Does it happen? Of course. But it's almost certainly not most sequels. None of the Marvel movies did it. The recent Bond series didn't. The Twilight movies didn't. The Hunger games didn't. The Lord of The Rings didn't. The Star Wars movies didn't. Back to the Future didn't.
In fact I would say it happens when no sequel was ever planned or imagined possible. That's when you make a simple character with only one issue or problem to overcome, and it gets resolved in the one planned movie. But if you think of a larger story beyond the one movie, you'll create more complex characters with more need and ability to evolve over time.
Back to the future added that weird "nobody calls me a chicken" shtick to Marty which came out of nowhere and was not present in the first movie. Then they proceeded to rebuild his entire character around it on the sequels.
Is that a retcon? Does it rewrite an aspect of his character? Or is it just an aspect that didn't come up in the first movie?
Seeing them back to back it felt like a weak asspull, even my kids reacted to it. But I didn't rewatch the first movie to see if it actually conflicts with original Marty. With it happening constantly in the sequels and never once in the original it's either poor writing or they changed him. Or both.
iirc the first movie makes Marty look like his Dad, a schlub whose only friend is a weird old guy. He doesn't push back against the teachers when they throw him out of the talent show.
Hardly a daredevil who never backs down from a challenge.
I think you've cracked it, Marty changes his past so that he grew up with a more assertive and confident father, so when the changes catch up to him in the second movie he suddenly has a new personality trait that he didn't have before!
You're giving me credit for an idea I did not have.
But you are correct; it's Lone Pine writ large.
100% not a retcon in my book.
Star Wars is an interesting case, there are some issues like the whole "from a certain point of view" debate (Anakin and Vader where still separate characters in early draft of ESB - https://screenrant.com/empire-strikes-back-original-script-anakin-vader-leia-change/ ) , Leia and Luke romantic tension ( https://www.inverse.com/entertainment/star-wars-empire-strikes-back-luke-leia-kiss-history ), or the fact that there's a second Death Star two movies after the first one is destroyed.
Lucas definitely had a few ideas when he started the first movie, but he still had to retcon quite a lot of elements as he went further in the saga
how much time elapsed between new hope and return? I feel like they could have been on hoth for awhile. Yeah they barely had the fighters setup for cold but with the base and finding hoth and such it could be years. Then between empire and return you have a whole bunch of offscreen stuff. Luke makes his own saber and seems to have done some sort of self training given how good he got (maybe more with yoda but it did not sound like that when he speaks with him). It was implied lando had to find where han was taken and stake it out and the whole plan had to be figured out and implemented and they knew he was safe sitting as a decoration. I mean that could be over a year or years as well.
The issue isn't the time required to build another one, just that it's weird to see the same "big evil thing to destroy" two times in a trilogy.
I mean they used it and it worked pretty effectively the first time. Like if someone had destroyed our nuke stockpile after hiroshima I think we would make more or if like the first carrier had been sunk but the concept proved effective I think we would make another.
The weapon makes sense, it's just a bit uninspired from a story telling perspective
thanks as my first thought was. Is that all that common? It does not seem to be in most movies sequels I have seen.
The Star Wars movie did.
Luke and Leia being siblings. The father thing
Maybe I have a different idea of what a retcon is.
Those are just new things. They don't roll back and change anything from the first movie. Luke was always an orphan who didn't know anything about his original family, so filling in that gap with new information isn't a retcon.
Well, I mean, that’s the heart of this whole discussion exactly what is the definition of a retcon?
I mean in Star Wars one of the big moments of episode four when it was just Star Wars was that Darth Vader killed Luke’s father.
That was later changed to became when Luke’s father became Darth Luke’s dad died. I mean, that’s a pretty significant alteration of the original story.
But again Luke's father dying didn't happen in episode 4. At that point it was just a story Luke was told. Turns out Luke was lied to. That's completely reasonable.
That's not an alteration of the original, the original (but isn't The Empire Strikes Back a part of the original anyway?) was simply Kenobi's retelling of what happened, not a narratively "objective" instance. Vader telling the story in a different way does not create any fundamental contradiction with the previous narrative.
Anyway, the original SW trilogy is much too homogenously constructed to warrant this sort of criticism in general. It's like saying Sophocles "retconned" Oedipus' story by revealing he had killed his father. A more problematic point would be e.g. the introduction of midichlorians in the prequels, which didn't unambiguously contradict the original trilogy but it sharply differed in spirit from it and had undesirable implications (genetic superiority of the Jedis).
No. One thing that Lucas very firmly illustrated is that he never had a grand vision of an over all storyline. He made it up as he went along.
That doesn't matter too much. He certainly had the intent to build the story beyond the first movie, and, putting aside these external circumstances and focusing on the movie itself, the 1st movie does not form a coherent complete narrative yet, in isolation it barely works.
Compare it with other film trilogies: clearly SW OT is more similar to LOTR and Matrix than to Godfather and Jurassic Park. In the latter cases it makes sense to speak of the original, not so much in the former.
OP writes "retcon the characters progression from the first movie", which I read as the character being put in front of the same obstacles they had to overcome originally, or regress in whatever way they evolved in the first movie, or something like that.
The family ties thing does nothing like that. Luke still has his force powers. He does get to do the training with Yoda, which is arguably similar to his training with Obi-Wan, but it's not like he's starting from from scratch again. He just needs to level up to have a shot at taking on Vader.
I was gonna say! And don't forget the prequels. And then the next sequels.
Omg the prequels took it to a whole other level.
Hell I forget to point out that Obi Wan reconned how Luke’s dad died…