X-Files Movie Back in Business...Again

By Katey Rich

'Twin Peaks' and 'My So-Called Life' are coming out on DVD, Jerry Seinfeld is back in the spotlight, and now there's going to be another X-Files movie-- 90s TV is back! David Duchovny has mentioned a potential X-Files movie for years, and today ComingSoon.net has confirmed the project will start on December 10 in Vancouver. Duchovny and Gillian Anderson are expected to star, and series creator Chris Carter will direct the script he wrote with Frank Spotnitz.

"I want us to go out and do what the show always did best, which is really smart, scary, ultimately ambiguous stuff," Duchovny said at TVGuide.com.Screenwriter Spotnitz gave an interview with Entertainment Weekly over a year ago that said he had locked the script down two years before that; "no conspiracy stuff," he promises. Bruce's Entertainment Tidbits links to a Chicago Sun-Times article from back in April in which Duchovny reveals that the story will take place five years after we last left Mulder and Scully. "It will be a stand-alone movie. You have to assume a lot of people don't know the show, so you need a plot that doesn't require that you've seen the TV series."

That's definitely a good move, given that the primary audience the studio will want to target was probably not even old enough to appreciate 'The X-Files' back in the mid-90s. I'm willing to admit that I didn't get into sci-fi on television until it was hip ('Heroes,' 'Lost'), but even I have to admit that we have 'X-Files' to thank for the glut of the spooky and the scary on TV right now. It seems like a particularly apt time for a comeback, with Duchovny back in the spotlight on 'Californication' and Anderson presumably ready to get her career jump-started again after most of her post-'Files' projects have failed to catch on.

Of course, sci-fi on TV and sci-fi at the movies are two totally different things. Name the last hits involving aliens. The Invasion? Hardly. War of the Worlds? Maybe, but it was quickly forgotten. These days it's superheroes, wizards and pirates, preferably those that come in mass-produced sequels. J.J. Abrams' Star Trek may come in the meantime to change the game, but for now, the distributor of The X-Files (most likely Fox) should hop on the TV geek bandwagon, lest the project get relegated to sci-fi specialty hell (remember The Last Mimzy? That's what I thought).