The X-Files can be remembered for any number of wins from back in the day, even at this point in the 2025 TV schedule more than thirty years after the premiere in 1993. Highlights can range from that legendary chemistry between David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson as Mulder and Scully to successfully releasing a feature film after five TV seasons on Fox. But when naming high points from the franchise, I’m guessing that most longtime fans will pick moments from the original run of the series and/or The X-Files: Fight the Future. The two revival seasons just didn’t hit the same, and 2008’s The X-Files: I Want to Believe wasn’t the success story that the previous film was.
Original series creator Chris Carter recently revealed that he’s getting to do a director’s cut of I Want to Believe, nearly twenty years after it hit theaters with the first appearances of Mulder and Scully since the Season 9 finale in 2002. Now, looking back from a 2025 perspective, I have to wonder: will it measure up to Fight the Future once Carter makes his changes?
The X-Files: I Want To Believe Director’s Cut
The X-Files: I Want to Believe was the second big screen venture for the franchise, but it was very different from Fight the Future back in 1998. While that was basically a blockbuster version of the kinds of conspiracies and alien mysteries that fans were used to from mythology episodes on Fox, I Want to Believe was more like an extended version of one of the show’s Monster of the Week episodes: short on aliens and heavier on horror.
It also wasn’t as much of a box office hit as the ‘98 film, with I Want to Believe reaching (per Box Office Mojo) a gross total of nearly $70 million on a $30 million budget compared to Fight the Future’s gross of nearly $190 million on a $66 million budget. So, I was as surprised as any fan when Chris Carter appeared on David Duchovny’s Fail Better with David Duchovny podcast to reveal that he “just got the go ahead to do a director’s cut of I Want to Believe” and he couldn’t express “how excited I am about this.”
Duchovny cut in to point out that Carter “took shit for that movie,” which… yes, I can remember spotting some fan complaints at the time, although that was before my time on social media. Carter went on:
Oh, big time. I made it too scary, basically, and I was told so by the brass at Fox, and they wanted a PG-13 movie. So we cut it back to be a PG-13 movie, and we thought, ‘Okay, we’ve satisfied their demands.’ The critics, the people who rate the movies, said ‘No, it’s not a PG-13 yet, you’ve got to cut it back even farther.’ I can tell you that you can do more on network television, [the censors] are more permissive than they are for the movies. Now I have a chance to go back and make the scary movie that I always intended to make. It’s not just doing a director’s cut to do a director’s cut. It’s really kind of bringing to life something that for me was on the page but never got to the screen.
Well, when he puts it that way, I almost feel guilty for my critiques of how he ended Season 11 and that horrifying twist from the Cigarette-Smoking Man about Scully! His comments definitely make me realize that I might not have given I Want to Believe a fair shot as a would-be scary story, especially since I included several scary Monster of the Week episodes from the '90s on my picks for the best episodes of The X-Files. So, with the movie available streaming with a Hulu subscription, is it time?
Carter didn't drop any details about when or how that director's cut might become available, and I doubt it'll be any time soon if he only recently got the go-ahead. His podcast episode with Duchovny released in June, and presumably wasn't filmed too far in advance. But I'm ready to think back on whether I was too hasty in my judgment of I Want to Believe back in the day compared to when I was a kid loving Fight the Future.
Have I Been Unfair To I Want To Believe?
I’ll come right out and admit it: I’ve seen The X–Files: I Want to Believe a grand total of one time, and that was back in 2008 when it came out. In contrast, I saw Fight the Future enough times on VHS in my pre-teen formative years that, to this day, I could probably do a one-woman performance of certain scenes from memory.
Am I proud of this? Not exactly, and the lessons I learned from the show as a longtime fan have come in much handier than knowing the hallway scene from Fight the Future front to back. But I mention it now to make the point that because I Want to Believe didn’t measure up to Fight the Future for me back in ‘08, I just didn’t give it the chance it may have deserved.
After all, co-writers Chris Carter and Frank Spotnitz had to find a way to undo part of the Season 9 finale to set up a story for Mulder and Scully back at the FBI in the movie, and that was enough of a challenge to sell. At the time, it felt more like a middling extended version of a middling episode, not a big-screen experience. An almost entirely new cast was certainly a contrast to Fight the Future's cameos galore.
Based on Carter’s comments, it sounds like his original vision for I Want to Believe would have delivered scares akin to iconic X-Files episodes like “Home,” “Squeeze,” or “Irresistable,” all of which were great entries during the ‘90s run of the show. He has me sold on watching the director’s cut whenever that becomes available, but now I feel like I should check out the original version so I’ll be able to compare and contrast. That one single view from 2008 was a long time ago.
Or am I blinded by nostalgia at the moment, and thinking about my childhood love for Fight the Future has glossed over some of Chris Carter’s divisive choices for the two revival seasons? That’s entirely possible, but the course of being an X-Files fan never did run smooth.
If you want to revisit the good, okay, and passable old days of The X-Files, you can find both movies as well as all eleven seasons streaming on Hulu now. The odds of David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson reprising their roles again may be slim, but Ryan Coogler has a reboot in the works with support from Anderson.
And hey, maybe Robert Patrick could finally get his chance to come back as John Doggett! For better or worse, most of the surviving characters from the last season of The X-Files original run at least briefly appeared in the revival seasons, with the exception of Agent Doggett.
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