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Total Film
Total Film
Entertainment
Molly Edwards

X-Files movie with 32% Rotten Tomatoes score getting a new director's cut on Disney Plus that is the "scary movie" the director "always intended"

David Duchovny as Mulder and Gillian Anderson as Scully.

The X-Files: I Want to Believe is getting a director's cut on Disney Plus.

The film didn't perform all that well at the box office when it was released in 2008, and it holds a critics score of just 32% on Rotten Tomatoes.

But, the film is getting a second life thanks to a new director's cut heading to Disney Plus on June 11 (H/T Polygon).

I Want to Believe picks up with Mulder and Scully both no longer working for the FBI, but both are pulled back in to a creepy case involving a missing agent and psychic visions.

Director Chris Carter revealed the director's cut on David Duchovny's Fail Better with David Duchovny podcast back in 2025, and he explained more about why he wanted to make it.

"I made it too scary, basically, and I was told so by the brass at Fox, and they wanted a PG-13 movie," he explained. "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, they're more permissive than the censors are for the movies, the people who rate the movies. And so 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 and never got to the screen."

X Files: I Want to Believe – Director's Cut streams on Disney Plus this June 11.

While you wait, check out our guide to all the upcoming movies and upcoming TV shows of the year for everything else that's on the way.

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