Retcons are shit. They really are.
You have an established story that people know and are invested in and then the author comes along as changes the history YOU KNOW after the fact, which completely changes the meaning of the story and characters you've been enjoying.
It usually done because of convenience: they went in a different direction with the later story so had to go make a change things to make it all work.

But can they WORK and not be disappointing?


Well… comics do it all the time with their changing origin stories, and movies based on comics do that too (UGH Spiderman….). That sort of works.
S
equels used to do it and that would occasionally work. Evil Dead 2 apparently did it, and Mad Max 2 certainly did- in fact all the Mad Max movies did it.
- The world of Mad Max 2 is NOT the same world as Mad Max 1, and Mad Max 3 has little to do with Mad Max 2 or 1. Mad Max Fury Road is basically in a new universe, there's no time-line for that stuff to work: for the level of devastation, the formation of the new society, with new cultural practises, and the construction of the giant fortress mountain would have taken much longer than for the fall of society in the first film and for Max to still only be in his 30s, 40s or even 50s.

Those retcons work because we look at the new films as being their own thing, we don't really view them as being that strongly connected to the earlier ones or changing them.
Do any other retcons work?

Evil Dead gets really complicated when you add in the comics and the TV series.
Turns out what really happened is a combination of the two movies.

So there the retcon does work. I wished there had been more from Army of Darkness but might have been some issues with rights to the property when Ash vs Evil Dead was done.

Other than that retcons are usually for the worse.

Depends on the retcon, I suppose… Personally I'm not opposed to retcons meant to add more depth to a story or patch a few plotholes. In the case of the movies you mentioned, these are projects where tons of hands are oj a single project, so it can sometimes be outright impossible to keep a single story straight for a variety of reasons, so the audience should be open to a few inconsistencies. In the case of Evil Dead 2 for example, from what I understand they wanted to do a recap of 1 but either didn't have the budget or not all of the actors were on board for it. Overall you're dealing with a self-contained universe from a few or a single flawed human mind, so the readers should probably be open to some fluidity of the story's universe. The only time I take issue with retcons is when something big and impactful is retconned, obviously like in comics where death has pretty much become the butt of the comic universes' joke.

One retcon I liked was X-Men deadly genesis which added story and characters between the original run of X men and the giant sized X men reboot that introduced the likes of nightcrawler, Storm and Wolverine. It worked well enough for my liking.
Also captain America the winter soldier, they retconned caps late cheesy side kick Bucky into a brainwashed killing machine.

Genejoke wrote:
Also captain America the winter soldier, they retconned caps late cheesy side kick Bucky into a brainwashed killing machine.

The comics or the movie?
I haven't read the comics, but the movie didn't retconn, Winter Soldier was sequential and filled us in about what happened to the missing/presumed dead Bucky while Cap was asleep. Didn't it?

Yeah, I meant the comics. He was originally killed off years back, then in the mid to late 2000s they did the retcon and it was genuinely well done.

Genejoke wrote:
Yeah, I meant the comics. He was originally killed off years back, then in the mid to late 2000s they did the retcon and it was genuinely well done.

Ah! I see! Marvel and DC make an art out of Retconns :D
Unlike novelists… The Ender's Game series is like a Jenga tower of retconns XD