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The horror film Chris Carter always intended to make is arriving June 11. Disney+ confirmed a director’s cut of The X-Files: I Want to Believe is coming to the streamer, and Carter has been very specific about what that means. Fox forced him to cut the film repeatedly to hit a PG-13. What played in theaters in 2008 was not what he wrote. Carter has spent the past year going back and making the scary movie he originally had in mind. June 11 is when audiences finally see it.
The Film Fox Wouldn’t Let Him Make
The X-Files: I Want to Believe arrived in 2008, six years after the series ended and a decade after Fight the Future. Chris Carter wrote and directed it, bringing David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson back for a standalone story with no mythology, no conspiracies, no Cigarette Smoking Man. Just a disgraced former priest, played by Billy Connolly, claiming psychic visions of a kidnapped FBI agent, and two people who are no longer agents themselves trying to figure out if they still believe in anything at all.
Audiences who came for aliens got a quiet, strange procedural about guilt and faith and psychic priests. Critics were mixed. The film opened to $10.2 million against a $30 million budget and largely disappeared from conversation within the month.
What the reviews mostly did not account for was how much had been cut before anyone saw it.
The Rating Battle
Carter laid out what happened on the Fail Better with David Duchovny podcast. Fox wanted PG-13. Carter turned in a cut he believed got there. The ratings board sent it back. He cut again. The board sent it back again. Multiple rounds before it reached theaters, and something came out with each pass.
“I made it too scary, basically, and I was told so by the brass at Fox,” Carter said. “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.’”
This is the man who made “Home” for network television in 1996. “The Host.” “Squeeze.” “Irresistible.” He has been making things scarier than they were supposed to be inside systems that did not want him to for thirty years. The MPAA turned out to be less forgiving than Fox Standards and Practices, which is a sentence that should not be possible to write.
“I can tell you that you can do more on network television,” Carter said. “The censors are more permissive than they are for the movies.”
The theatrical cut always felt like something was missing. Duchovny and Anderson were doing real work. Connolly was unsettling in the right ways. Amanda Peet as FBI agent Dakota Whitney was holding her own against two of the most iconic characters in genre television. The performances were there. June 11 is when the rest of the film shows up around them.
What the Director’s Cut Actually Is
Carter was deliberate about framing this as more than a completist release. “It’s not just doing a director’s cut to do a director’s cut,” he said. “It’s really kind of bringing to life something that for me was on the page and never got to the screen.”
Most director’s cuts restore scenes that were cut for pacing. Twenty extra minutes, dropped subplots, a longer version of something that already existed. This is different. The DVD had an Extended Cut, but Carter himself described it as only a few additional minutes. What he has been working on for the past year is the version he originally conceived. Fox released a PG-13 thriller in 2008. The Disney+ cut is the horror film he always intended to make.
I Want to Believe is standalone, which means nobody needs to do mythology homework before June 11. The Mulder and Scully character work is some of the most honest the franchise ever produced. They are no longer FBI agents. They are living together and figuring out what that means, and the film takes that seriously in a way the revival series mostly did not. All of that is already in the theatrical cut. What is coming back is the horror Carter wrote around it.
Carter created The X-Files in 1993. Nine seasons. Three Golden Globes for Best Drama, back to back to back from 1996 to 1998. One of the defining genre television properties of the 1990s, and a show that was regularly doing things on network TV that theatrical horror at the same moment was not getting away with. I Want to Believe was his attempt to bring that to a feature film.
Fox cut the teeth out of it before anyone could see if it worked. The audience got the wrong film. Carter never got to release what he made.
June 11. The version he wrote.