Time Travel Flowchart Tracks Cinematic Time Hoppers

By David Wharton | Updated

This article is more than 2 years old

TImeTravelSmallTime travel is confusing and fraught with perils. There are paradoxes and duplicates and accidentally becoming your own grandfather. Thankfully time travel will likely forever remain in the realm of fiction, so we won’t have to worry about stepping on a paleolithic butterfly or getting conquered by bald assholes from the future. But that doesn’t mean Hollywood’s love affair with time travel is going to end anytime soon, and in spite of being well-trodden ground, people still keep finding new spins to put on ideas that are at least as old as H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. At least now we can keep track of all — okay, a bunch — of the big-screen time travelers we know and love, courtesy of the handy-dandy flowchart above (you can click the image for a larger version).

Originally posted on the tumblr of one Mr. Dalliard, it’s not clear if it’s his creation or shared from elsewhere, but we’ll presume the former for now and offer him a virtual high five. The chart covers all the big time travel movies that immediately spring to mind when you think about the genre, and quite a few you’ve probably done your best to forget about. The Back to the Future and Terminator movies are gimmes, but I’d completely forgotten the existence of stuff like Next, The Jacket, and Day Break. Or maybe I had them retconned out of my brain after a time travel incident…wait, didn’t my hair used to be blonde?