Did I Want To Believe do what The Cigarette Smoking Man couldn't do despite repeated attempts: shut down the X-Files permanently?  Writer / producer Frank Spotnitz says emphatically: "Don't know."  Well, if there is a third X-Files movie, would it wrap up the mythology?  Spotnitz' reply: "Would want [it] to, yes."  This is coming from an interview between Spotnitz and SciFiMoviePage.com concerning the prospect of a third film, and what went wrong with the second Mulder / Scully adventure a few scant months ago.

Spotnitz is candid about the failure of X-F: IWTB to find an audience: “We opened a week after The Dark Knight and got mowed down by it,” he says. “No one knew what a huge historical event it would be.” Be that as it may, he would welcome the chance to do one last movie to wrap up the mythology.  And it should specifically concern the year of 2012, the supposed end of the world mentioned by CSM in the horrid series finale of the show.  When asked by the website if that would mean that it would be competing head-to-head with Roland Emmerich's upcoming 2012, Spotnitz said that “They won’t be directly in competition as they are very different genres.”  The article then deftly pointed out a certain urinating scene in the first X-Files movie.

I haven't seen I Want To Believe yet.  Devin wasn't floored by it, and that's being generous.  But I don't want this, one of the greatest shows - and not just genre shows - of the last 25 years to end on the shitty note that was this sequel.  It already crawled to a dismal end of a nine-year-that-should-have-been-seven-year run on TV.  If there was one thing that the series finale - you know, the one where Mulder saw dead people and CSM became a trache-smoking, Indian hippie - got right, it was setting up for the resolution of the entire byzantine alien mythology the show established by naming the end date: 10/22/2012.  The fact that this needs to be the subject of the next movie, and that that movie should be the capper to the whole shebang is a no-brainer.  I hope that Chris Carter and Frank Spotnitz can get it done. 

Thanks to James for the tip.