This January, to prepare for the release of the new six-part season of The X-Files, we’re wrapping up our coverage of the show, particularly handling the various odds and ends between the show’s last episode and the launch of the revival.
The plan was always to transition The X-Files from television to film, but fans change.
Following the success of The X-Files: Fight the Future, there had been some mumblings about the possibility of releasing a film in the summer of 2000. Given that The X-Files was a cultural property rooted in the nineties, it seemed like a big screen adventure would have been the perfect way to bring Mulder and Scully into the twenty-first century. After all, the original plan was that the show would retire in its seventh season. (The network even had a bespoke successor selected in Chris Carter’s Harsh Realm.)
Gotta have faith…
However, this was not to be. It turned out that
Fight the Future represented the cultural peak of
The X-Files, the moment of maximum pop culture saturation. Almost immediately upon the production team’s move to California at the start of the sixth season, the show’s rating began their slow (and then not so slow) decline. The seventh season was itself hampered by behind-the-scenes drama, with
David Duchovny suing Chris Carter and Fox over syndication. At the same time, Fox’s
“worst season ever” meant that the broadcast could not afford to cancel
The X-Files.
So, understandably, the sequel to Fight the Future was postponed and put on the long-finger. As the show came to an end in its ninth season, the subject of a second X-Files feature film arose again. Still, there was a debate to be had about whether the world really wanted a second X-Files film. While the sixth and seventh seasons had slowly eroded the show’s popularity and appeal, the ninth completely collapsed it; through the combination of bad storytelling decisions and the broader shift in the political mood, The X-Files felt like a spent cultural force.
“Platonic”, eh?
Ultimately, that was not to be either. The production history of
The X-Files: I Want to Believe often recalls the mythology at the heart of
The X-Files, with the project constantly shifting and changing as outside forces intervene.
I Want to Believe arrived in cinemas in July 2008, a full decade after
Fight the Future and more than six years after the broadcast of
The Truth. The finished product is radically different from what anybody might have imagined in the immediate aftermath of
Fight the Future, its design often surreal and awkward.
If I Want to Believe would have been a strange choice for an X-Files film release in July 2000, it seemed downright perverse in July 2008.
The truth is out there. Way out there.
Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: chris carter, frank spotnitz, homophobia, i want to believe, legend, myth, mythology, non-review review, reflexive, review, shippers, Television, the x-files, transphobia | 6 Comments »
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