It’s been nearly twenty years since the release of The X-Files: I Want to Believe, with the 2008 movie serving as the second and last feature film based on the series. Directed by series creator Chris Carter, I Want to Believe finds Mulder and Scully called back to duty by the FBI when a former priest claims to be receiving psychic visions pertaining to a kidnapped agent.
The idea was for The X-Files: I Want to Believe to essentially be a feature length monster-of-the-week tale, and it came along ten years after the original X-Files movie. Unfortunately, while 1998’s movie scared up $189 million at the global box office, I Want to Believe ended its run with just $69 million, and the franchise later returned to the small screen in its wake.
The eventual physical media release of The X-Files: I Want to Believe included a few minutes of new footage not seen in the theatrical cut, but that’s not the true “Director’s Cut” of the film. Chris Carter has been teasing in recent years that he’s working on a brand new Director’s Cut for I Want to Believe, and it looks like that cut may be quietly arriving on Disney+ this June.
A press release from Disney+ that previews the new titles arriving to the streaming service in June 2026 includes the following title for premiere on Thursday, June 11, 2026:
The X-Files: I Want to Believe – Director’s Cut | Bonus Feature
The best source of information for what this might be is an interview with Chris Carter on the Fail Better With David Duchovny podcast from last year. That’s where Carter detailed the new Director’s Cut that he was working on at the time, which he teased as being the “the scary movie” that he had originally intended The X-Files: I Want to Believe to be.
Carter detailed, “I just got the go ahead to do a Director’s Cut of I Want to Believe. I can’t tell you how excited I am about this. 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.”
“Now I have a chance to go back and make the scary movie that I always intended to make,” Carter explained last year. “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.“
As for why Disney+ lists this Director’s Cut as a “Bonus Feature,” our assumption is that the new cut of the movie will be included as a Bonus Feature for the theatrical cut of The X-Files: I Want to Believe within the app. It’s also possible that we’re ONLY getting a Bonus Feature exploration of the new cut on June 11 ahead of its actual arrival on the streaming service at some point in the future, but it seems pretty safe to assume the actual cut is releasing June 11.
I want to believe that’s the case…
Stay tuned for more on The X-Files: I Want to Believe Director’s Cut as we learn it.
Also coming soon? Ryan Coogler’s “The X-Files” reboot series!
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