Movie Timelines is a YouTube channel run by Josh Spiegel. Beginning in 2017, Spiegel started watching various film franchises and analyzing their continuity (or lack of it). He has since expanded the channel with new series. Dead Last features participation from his Patreon patrons and sees them ranking individual franchises from Best to Dead Last. The Decades Project sees Spiegel watching every single horror movie from a given decade. Failure To Launch covers movies that were meant or predicted to spawn franchises, but didn't for one reason or another. Do You Worst, the most recent addition, sees Spiegel covering movies suggested by viewers that they consider to be the absolute worst horror has to offer with the goal of finding the worst horror movie ever made.
The channel can be found here
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For Spiegel's feature directorial work, see The Complex (2012) and The Last Amityville Movie, the latter of which features cameos from many of the channel's patrons.
Tropes dissected in the Movie Timelines videos:
- Acoustic License: Crosses over with Artistic License – Biology. When covering Police Academy, Spiegel points out that Sgt. Jones's ability to mimic sound effects would only actually fool people if everyone around him was incapable of determining which direction a sound is coming from.
- Alternate History: Pops up when a franchise's continuity contradicts real life.
- Friday the 13th: Due to the ten-year time skip in Part VII and established dates from earlier entries in the series, Part VIII takes place after September of 2001, and the presence of the Twin Towers in that film means that the series takes place in a timeline in which 9/11 never happened.
- Saw: Thanks to this franchise's creative team going out of their way to maintain continuity, Spiegel determined that a flashback in which John Kramer attends a Year of the Pig celebration occurs in a year which was not the Year of the Pig in Real Life, placing the franchise in an alternate timeline in which the Chinese New Year lines up differently with the calendar year.
- Alternate Timeline: Due to the sheer amount of Continuity Snarls and Retcons in the X-Men prequel films, Spiegel determined that they are not prequels at all, but instead a full Continuity Reboot, and that the Bad Future in Days of Future Past is not in continuity with the original timeline, but instead an alternate timeline where many of the same events occurred.
- Broad Strokes: When sequel has some consistency with previous entries the franchise, but enough snarls to prevent things from lining up properly, Spiegel will often state that it makes the most sense for the sequel to take place in an Alternate Timeline in which the same events took place but some of the details were different.
- Consistency: What Spiegel is analyzing in his videos. He praises the Saw franchise's commitment to maintaining continuity, with nearly every date on every document lining up.
- Continuity Snarl: Pops up frequently. The worst offenders tend to be comedy franchises like Scary Movie, which sometimes fall under Negative Continuity due to the jokes taking priority. The average horror franchise isn't much better.
- Flat Character: When covering Police Academy, Spiegel points out that, with the exception of Zed, none of the characters get much in the way of depth or development.
- Freeze-Frame Bonus: One of Spiegel's primary methods of determining when a film takes place is by looking for things like calendars on walls, car registration stickers, and dates on documents, many of which are only visible for a handful of seconds.
- Negative Continuity: Called out fairly often, such as Brenda's appearance in Scary Movie 2 despite having died in the first film.
- Retcon: Spiegel frequently calls franchises out for this.
- Bride of Chucky introduces the Heart of Damballa and states that Chucky was wearing it when he died despite no such amulet being on his person in the first film.
- Silent Hill: Revelation 3D breaks continuity with the first film in multiple ways, such as introducing a second cult and claiming that the first movie's cult works for them while also completely changing the motives of the first cult and Dark Alessa.
- Sequelitis: Many In-Universe examples.
- Spiegel considers Jaws 2 to be about a 50% decrease in quality from the first film.
- He considers The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 to be a mere 30% decrease in quality from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974).
- He considers Hannibal to be a 90% decrease in quality from The Silence of the Lambs.
- Series Continuity Error: Myriad In-Universe examples, especially when a franchise's sequels can't be bothered to maintain consistency.
Tropes applying in general to Movie Timelines productions:
- April Fools' Day: On April 1st, 2018, Spiegel uploaded a video covering The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, which he described as having many sequels and spinoffs. After covering the film, he seemed surprised to learn that the film had not spawned even a single sequel and declared that he would simply sit and wait until one got made. The last three-quarters of the video are a static shot of a skeleton (meant to be Spiegel) sitting in his usual spot, having died waiting for said sequel.
- Filming Location Cameo: Invoked. Spiegel will frequently visit locations where the films he's covering were made. Most notably, the Myers house makes an appearance whenever he covers the Halloween franchise.
- Inconsistent Episode Lengths: An episode's length depends on the size of the franchise being covered. Series with only two entires have the shortest runtimes, and Spiegel has dubbed these "Mini Timelines", as he feels that a proper franchise needs three or more entries. Conversely, when he covered Godzilla, he split the video into two parts due to the sheer number of films in the series.
- Recurring Character: Spiegel's wife and child make semi-frequent appearances in his videos.
- Special Guest: Thanks to his wife's work in the industry and his own connections, Spiegel often has famous faces in his videos, typically someone whose work is featured in one or more of the films being covered.
- Amalgamated Dynamics co-founder and Harbinger Down director Alec Gillis appears in the Pumpkinhead video.
- Robin Riker appears in the video covering Alligator.
- Amalgamated Dynamics