Hulu’s X-Files reboot from director Ryan Coogler added its second lead Thursday. Himesh Patel joins previously announced Danielle Deadwyler as the two new FBI agents assigned to investigate unexplained phenomena. Neither character has anything to do with Fox Mulder or Dana Scully. Neither David Duchovny nor Gillian Anderson is attached to the project.
Chris Carter, the show’s original creator, confirmed back in 2023 that Coogler contacted him specifically about rebooting The X-Files with a diverse cast. The result is a show built from the ground up to replace the two white leads who made the franchise a cultural landmark.
Hollywood has run this play before. The BBC cast a Black actor as the Doctor in Doctor Who. The new Harry Potter series on HBO cast a Black actor as Severus Snape. Amazon’s The Rings of Power populated Middle-earth with Black elves and dwarves, characters drawn from a mythology Tolkien rooted in Northern European legend. Every one of those properties bled audience trust. Every one was sold as progress. The X-Files reboot is next in line.
Coogler’s filmography is built on the same premise. Black Panther was a film explicitly about Black identity and the exclusion of outsiders. Sinners continued that project. He is not a filmmaker who views storytelling as racially neutral, and Disney hired him knowing that. The X-Files reboot is not a passion project to honor a beloved franchise. It is a franchise title being used to deliver a pre-determined cultural message.
The original show’s track record makes this worse. The X-Files original nine-season run secured sixteen Emmy Awards and set viewership records for Fox, peaking at an average of nearly twenty million viewers during its fifth season. The engine behind all of it was the chemistry between Duchovny and Anderson. Even critics who disliked the revivals admitted that much. Rotten Tomatoes’ consensus on the 2016 season read: “Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny’s chemistry remains intact, but overall, The X-Files revival lacks the creative spark necessary to sustain the initial rush of nostalgia.”
The revivals with the original stars still failed. The 2016 season premiered to 21.4 million viewers on nostalgia alone. Fox brought the show back for an eleventh season in 2018. Audiences did not respond in the same way, and that was the last the franchise produced. Critics broadly dismissed the final two seasons as a failure.
That was with Mulder, Scully, and their creator Chris Carter. The show still lost its audience.
Now the plan is to do it without any of them, with two entirely new characters whose connection to thirty years of mythology is undefined, led by a director whose stated creative priority is racial representation over storytelling continuity.
The official logline describes “two highly decorated but vastly different FBI agents” who “form an unlikely bond.” That is a network procedural pitch. It has nothing to do with Mulder’s obsession with his sister, the Cigarette Smoking Man, the black oil, the colonization mythology, or any of the specific architecture that made audiences care about this show for nine seasons. Borrowing the title does not borrow the audience.
Production is slated to begin in May 2026 in Vancouver. A pilot order does not guarantee a series. Given the franchise’s own history with reboots, and given what Disney has done to every other property it acquired with a built-in white fanbase, there is no reason to expect this one to land differently.
What do you think of Disney’s diveristy hire approach to the X-Files reboot? Let us know in the comments.
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I'm not at all interested in the Malcolm X-Files.
This will rot on Disney+ with the rest of Disney's zombified acquired IP, on a channel lorded over by Bluey and 10-year olds.
Disney delenda est.