Published Jul 16, 2026, 11:58 AM EDT
Cathal Gunning has been writing about movies, television, culture, and politics online and in print since 2017. He worked as a Senior Editor in Adbusters Media Foundation from 2018-2019 and wrote for WhatCulture in early 2020. He has been a Senior Features Writer for ScreenRant since 2020.
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While director Ryan Coogler’s reboot of The X-Files is one of the most exciting TV shows in the works right now, the decision to drop the original show’s cast in favor of new stars is still undeniably a double-edged sword for the franchise. It is tough to overstate the cultural impact of The X-Files. While David Lynch and Mark Frost’s dark murder mystery masterpiece Twin Peaks also contributed to the development of the supernatural cop show subgenre, The X-Files truly defined this TV mainstay.
Without David Duchovny’s true believer Agent Mulder and Gillian Anderson’s resident skeptic Agent Scully looking into paranormal phenomena across America, viewers would likely never have gotten the WB’s 15-season hit Supernatural, Grimm, Evil, Lucifer, Fringe, or the later ’90s classic Buffy the Vampire Slayer. All of these hits, to one extent or another, borrowed the idea of mixing a police procedural format with supernatural storytelling elements from* The X-Files*.
However, while The X-Files shaped modern pop culture, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the franchise itself has always been able to meet the cultural moment since the show’s original run ended in 2002. The X-Files lasted nine seasons and 202 episodes, releasing its first theatrical movie spinoff, 1998’s The X-Files: Fight the Future, just over halfway through this run. Six years after the series finale, Mulder and Scully were reunited in a second standalone movie, The X-Files: I Want to Believe.
It was another eight years before 2016’s two-season revival of* The X-Files *brought the duo back together for the third and, it is now clear, final time. The revival was divisive, with fans appreciating the monster-of-the-week episodes but complaining that Scully was stripped of her agency in a mean-spirited storyline that undid her already infamous pregnancy arc from a decade later.
While Scully’s pregnancy storyline had always been divisive, as the arc put Anderson’s character through a lot of torture for little payoff, the revival’s revelations about her child were downright disheartening. It wasn’t just fans who noticed this shift, with Anderson herself saying she was let down by the revival’s storyline in a 2022 Variety interview. As such, perhaps it should not have come as a surprise when Sinners director Ryan Coogler’s reboot of the series announced new leads for the show’s upcoming pilot.
While the recently rejected reboot of* Buffy the Vampire Slayer* was set to bring back Sarah Michelle Gellar’s original title character in a central supporting role, Coogler’s take on* The X-Files *will instead star Himesh Patel and Danielle Deadwyler as an all-new pair of FBI agents. One could argue that this clean break is a good thing, since the history of The X-Files franchise has always revolved around Mulder and Scully, but it doesn’t necessarily need to.
Perhaps it is worth noting that, although both shows were classic ’90s procedurals that blended supernatural story elements with character drama, The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s biggest difference is right there in the title. The appeal of Buffy the Vampire Slayer was always rooted in its title character, whereas* The X-Files* was ostensibly meant to be about the curious cases that this FBI department was investigating.
The news that Amy Madigan, Ben Foster, Lochlyn Munro, and Steve Buscemi will all guest star in the upcoming reboot of The X-Files proves Coogler’s show will still boast an impressive cast, even without Duchovny and Anderson. Thus, since the show was always theoretically primarily concerned with the eponymous mysterious investigations, the reboot should face no problems.
However, it has always been clear that Anderson and Duchovny’s chemistry was part of what made The X-Files work, and Mulder and Scully were as much a pivotal part of the show’s appeal as the cases they faced and the conspiracies they uncovered. Thus, it will take a while for The X-Files reboot to prove the duo isn’t necessary for a new take on the series.
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Science Fiction
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1993 - 2018-00-00