The Film Fox Released and the Film Carter PitchedChris Carter directed and co-wrote with Frank Spotnitz, and the premise they built is, once you scrape the snow off it, body horror. The I Want to Believe director’s cut puts the operation back at the center. If the I Want to Believe director’s cut does nothing else, restoring that half of the argument should make the other half make sense. Ryan Coogler has an X-Files pilot at Hulu, and dropping an eighteen-year-old director’s cut into the middle of that project’s post-Sinners news cycle is a catalog play. The man being handed a second chance at his own worst-reviewed work has no authorship over where the franchise goes next, and the I Want to Believe director’s cut is arriving as an artifact rather than a course correction.