Welcome to 1973: Wolverine and Beast go back to the future… 

It’s not easy to keep Wolverine down. And if you needed any further proof of that check out this photo, tweeted by Bryan Singer. Not only will Hugh Jackman’s mutant killing machine be tearing up our screens in The Wolverine, which opens on 15 July this year, but 12 months later he’ll be back among his fellow mutants in X-Men: Days Of Future Past.

The only problem is, he shouldn’t be there. As the first X-Men film showed, Wolverine didn’t join Professor X’s mutants until much later in his life. Yet here he is, in 1973, hanging out in their headquarters with a younger version of Hank McCoy’s Beast (Nicholas Hoult). “Welcome to 1973,” tweeted Singer, in case the impressive ’70s threads hadn’t given it away.

Fans immediately began an online howl that cried out one word: “Continuity!” But as Singer’s film uses a classic X-Men time-travel tale, it can get away with all kinds of things. Given that the story has been created by merging the younger cast of X-Men: First Class with the main players from Singer’s X-Men and X2 films, we’re willing to cut him a lot of slack.

Singer describes Days Of Future Past as an “epic combination of casts,” explaining that, “the movie takes place at different times. It deals with time displacement.”

It seems that – SPOILER – mutants in the future are being hunted down and either killed or imprisoned, causing one mutant to send her thoughts into the past to try and change their bleak destinies.