The X-Files is all the rage in 2026, with a new director’s cut of I Want to Believe, a just-released Lego set, and Oscar winner Ryan Coogler rebooting the show with a diverse cast.
“I can’t believe they’re letting me do this.” That’s the first thing that went through original showrunner Chris Carter‘s mind last year when he was given the green light to produce a director’s cut of his 2008 film that featured the return of paranormal investigators Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson).
Sixteen years after that movie made $69 million at the global box office, it has been revamped on Disney+ and Hulu with a spookier feel and an updated title: The X-Files: I Want to Believe – Vrach Frankenshteyn. It begins streaming on Friday.
While Disney didn’t give Carter a blank check, “They were willing to go for it,” he tells Gold Derby. His original 2008 vision was a “scary” Frankenstein story, but it was deemed too frightening for moviegoers and would have earned an R rating. The studio instructed him to pull back on certain elements so the film could receive a PG-13 rating and hopefully reach a wider audience.
For the restoration, “I was able to hire two different editors who looked at the picture and made some changes, and I liked their changes,” Carter says. “I had given them some marching orders. I felt that because we were ordered to cut the movie back to PG-13, it became kind of a Mulder and Scully relationship movie that happened to have some X-Files material in it. I wanted to turn that around and make it a good, scary, stand-alone X-Files story that happened to involve Mulder and Scully’s ongoing relationship.”
The result is something “closer to what I originally intended,” Carter explains. “I wanted to make a Frankenstein movie. The original inspiration for this movie was I had read a story about a doctor who had done a transplant of a monkey head onto another monkey successfully. I thought, ‘That’s X-Files territory.’ I got on a plane, I flew to Cleveland, Ohio, and I looked up this doctor. He was kind enough to sit with me and talk to me about that operation. I tried to tell that story with human beings.”
Carter notices a current connection between the film and what’s happening in society: “It’s funny that the story now actually has relevance as people are talking about looksmaxxing or bodymaxing. There are tech bros who want to live forever. Is a head transplant a way to live forever? If you could do it with a monkey, as we are suggesting, you could do it with a human being. It has relevance in science in a way it didn’t in 2008.”
The X-Files composer Mark Snow died in July 2025, but his themes can still be heard in the director’s cut. “I reached out to him, not knowing how sick he was, just before he passed,” Carter recalls. “I told him, ‘Those six notes will outlive all of us, The X-Files six-note theme.’ We had a wonderful exchange. He died, and we resurrected him with this movie and this score.”
The show’s music editor Jeff Charbonneau returned to help fill in some of the gaps. “He was there from the beginning,” Carter explains. “He had done the temp score on the pilot and started working with me and Mark at the same time. He came back to the movie and helped with that Clannad song [‘Theme From Harry’s Game’] that we’ve added when Gillian is doing the operation on the young kid, Christian. Additions like that brought that B-story to life in a new way.”
Looking ahead, Carter will receive an executive producer credit on Coogler’s reboot of The X-Files. However, he hasn’t yet had any influence on that highly anticipated Hulu project.
“I have had absolutely no input,” Carter reveals. “Ryan Coogler and I spoke briefly. They sent me the script. I haven’t read it on purpose. I want to sit down and watch it like everyone else. He’s a master of his craft, and I’m sure it’ll be an original approach. It’ll be his version of The X-Files and simply his alone.”
Carter denies he’s passing the baton to Coogler for good, claiming he still has more ideas in mind for Mulder and Scully. “I have a big idea that I set up in Seasons 10 and 11, a story that I want to tell,” he states. “I don’t want to get in the way of Ryan Coogler’s reboot, but if there’s a chance to tell this story, I want to. Whether a new series or a movie, I would be more than happy to get that opportunity. I just don’t want to get in the way of his work.”
As for the new X-Files Lego set, Carter says two of his fan friends were “disappointed” that there wasn’t a mini-figure of him included — despite multiple characters appearing, including the Flukeman — so they created their own “white-haired man as a Lego character” and sent him a photo. “And so,” he chuckles, “another mind-blowing little X-Files tidbit.”
