The upcoming X-files sequel has finished filming, unless of course this is another convincing lie cooked up by Chris Carter and his team. They've admitted it by the way, that those photos leaked out from the set showing Mulder and Scully liplocked were concocted by him. The story comes from The National Post, where Duchovny flat out says, “We staged that.” I’m betting they’ve staged a lot of other stuff too.
If you’re wondering why someone might invent fake stuff to feed to their fans, well the answer is pretty obvious. The X-Files 2 team doesn’t care about their fans. Of the film co-writer, producer Frank Spotnitz says: “We're not doing an exercise in nostalgia to appeal to the fans of the show.” He doesn’t want his now over 30 fans, he wants hip, young kids. Spotnitz admits, “We saw this as an opportunity to introduce the characters to people who may have been too young . . . It has a reason for being, even if there'd never been a television show before.”
It’s a disappointing stance, but it’s not an entirely unique one. Maybe they've taken it to the extreme by actually lying to their fans about what they're doing, but shutting fans out has become the new thing on productions with heavy fan investment. JJ Abrams for instance has kept Star Trek under lock and key, refusing to let Trekkies have even the slightest notion of what he’s doing to something they’ve invested decades in.
It’s an about face from the revolution in Hollywood/fan interaction which seemed to be underway a few years ago, when people like Peter Jackson and Bryan Singer basically flung the doors open on the sets of Lord of the Rings, Superman, and King Kong to let their fans in on everything they were doing. It worked with Lord of the Rings, but apparently Hollywood doesn’t think Superman and King Kong were big enough successes, and word on the street is that they’ve blamed a lot of the perceived failure of those films on how open the directors were with fans beforehand. Ridiculous really, when you consider that both of those movies made a helluva lot of money.
So now we’ve gone from inviting fans to be excited about and involved with the movies they care about to shutting them out entirely, lying to them, and courting a young, hip, ironic t-shirt wearing demographic instead. Call me a whiny fanboy, but that rubs me the wrong way.
Is X-Files 2 finished filming? Maybe. If you want to believe the people actually making X-Files 2. Ok, they probably has no reason to lie about that. Here’s something that probably is a lie though. Yet another anonymous email dropped into my inbox this evening claiming that X-Files 2 is all about werewolves. Yeah right. I get at least one of these a week now. Here’s what this particular random, would-be scooper had to say in an email titled “From X-Files Producer”: “I just learned the "shocking" ending of the movie -- that Scully finds Mulder in a hospital where he has disappeared, and uses her medical expertise to perform a life-saving operation on him. The movie ends with a classic "X-Files" cliffhanger when the audience discovers in the final scene that Scully hasn't in fact saved Mulder at all -- that he has actually turned into a werewolf!!” The sad thing here is that even if our scooper was actually able to confirm that he’d gotten this information from one of the X-Files 2 movie’s producers, there would still be no reason to believe it.
UPDATE! One of our commenters below was kind enough to post the URL of a video recording of the entire press conference. Watch it here.
