Director’s Cut of ‘The X-Files: I Want to Believe’ Coming to Disney+ this June!

Is a director’s cut of The X-Files: I Want to Believe coming soon to Disney+? Well, not to give you a big ole’ eye roll to start your morning off, but, er, I want to believe.

The streamer just put out their list of titles coming to the service in June. It seems almost too good to be true, but listed right there, clear as day, is The X-Files: I Want to Believe director’s cut. So, the truth is out there (sorry, I’ll stop, I swear).

The second X-Files film to be released, I Want to Believe arrived in 2008 from director/creator, Chris Carter. It followed Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson) who are called back to duty when a priest claims to have psychic visions about a kidnapped FBI agent. The film saw modest returns, but I can’t say it was a rave hit at the time.

Via JoBlo, Carter appeared on the Fail Better with David Duchovny podcast, where he had this to say about I Want to Believe and a director’s cut: “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.“

Continued Carter, “Now I have a chance to go back and make the scary movie that I always intended. 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.“

Listen, I have no issue with a PG-13 rating…when the project is intended for it. But the fact that Carter had to cut and cut and cut until his vision was slashed to ribbons? That’s how you end up with a watered down film, and audiences clearly felt that with . So, the fact that this director’s cut could be the “scary” version that the filmmaker intended? Well, let’s just say Disney+ has me abducted and seated.