It’s been said that the “brand-new, never-before-seen R-rated Chris Carter director’s cut” of The X-Files: I Want to Believe – Vrach Frankenshteyn will “faithfully restore the filmmaker’s original vision.” Now, you can see for yourself as Entertainment Weekly passes along the new trailer and poster for the recut film, from 20th Century Studios, which will be available on Hulu and Disney+ on August 14.
Carter told Entertainment Weekly,
We set out to make a real-life Frankenstein movie, and due to a variety of factors, our Frankenstein never completely left the operating room. A chance to apply the electrodes again was a special thrill.”sponsored content
The X-Files: I Want to Believe was not received as well by critics as the previous film and it would also perform poorly at the box office. Despite the yearning for a reunion between Mulder and Scully, the movie proved to be pretty divisive among fans, but almost twenty years later, perhaps the new cut will add enough elements to recontextualize it and satisfy a wider audience. Check out the new poster below.
The X-Files creator Chris Carter explained on the Fail Better with David Duchovny podcast last year that he was given the go-ahead to work on a director’s cut of the film.
“I made it too scary, basically, and I was told so by the brass at Fox, and they wanted a PG-13 movie,” Carter said. “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.“
He continued, “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.“
An extended cut of I Want to Believe was included on the film’s physical media release, totalling about 3 minutes of new and alternate footage. As Carter only started working on this new cut last year, this will likely be different. The film follows Mulder and Scully as they are called back to duty by the FBI when a former priest claims to be receiving psychic visions pertaining to a kidnapped agent.