The truth is out there. Again. Maybe.

Ryan Coogler, the Oscar-winning filmmaker behind Sinners and the Black Panther franchise, has been teasing his reboot of The X-Files for years. Coogler has since confirmed that he is actively developing the new series — and that it will be officially Mom-approved.

"Like my relationship with Rocky with my dad, The X-Files is one of those things with my Mom," Coogler told Variety at a special screening of Sinners at Hollywood Forever Cemetery. "I want to do right by her and the fans. My Mom has read some of the stuff I wrote for it. She's fired up."

Like so many X-Philes, Coogler (and Fired-Up Mama Coogler) clearly have warm memories of watching the original series during the 1990s, an era of relative idealism. The early seasons of The X-Files tapped into a cultural landscape of relief over the end of the Cold War, a respite in which countercultural movements flourished. Longstanding fears and anxieties projected onto foreign enemies began to turn inward to side-eye authorities at home.

Needless to say, there's been a vibe shift since those days. In 2026, conspiracies about aliens are no longer whispered in private. They are mainstream and often profitable. There is no one "truth" that is out there, but rather billions of "takes" spliced into prisms of scrolls and reels. We're losing our footing, instead of finding it.

It brings to mind Francis Fukuyama's notorious description of the 1990s as "the end of history," which he intended as an idealistic promise of a more stable and liberalized world. The vibe in 2026 is also that we might be at "the end of history," but it's more like an apocalyptic threat. The old world is rupturing through climate change, economic turmoil, political polarization, and a vigorous backlash to civil rights. The new world has yet to be born. To channel the famous quote from the philosopher Antonio Francesco Gramsci, written a century ago, "now is the time of monsters."

While that's kind of a bummer in reality, it is excellent grist for a revival of The X-Files. With that in mind, here are a few themes and elements that we hope to see explored in the reboot from Coogler, who has proved time and again that he can capture the mood of an era — and find something new to say about it.

The brand of The X-Files is inseparable from its famous mottos: "I want to believe" and "The truth is out there." In the original series, these phases are expressions of hope, initially linked to Fox Mulder's personal faith that he would one day find his sister, and his overall belief that the truth — one clear and distinct truth — can be discernibly identified.

But in 2026, the phrase "I want to believe" seems to come more from a place of desperation than optimism. It's not necessarily "I want to believe" in aliens, but a clarion call to find anything whatsoever in which to place faith. Whereas the 1990s phrase captured a spirit of independent resilience in the face of dogma, it now reads as a weary last gasp for solid ground in a world overrun with phantasmagorical slop.

Likewise, the idea that "the truth is out there" has lost all meaning. Even if it were, would anyone care? Hard truths constantly fall by the wayside in our time. For a reboot of The X-Files to hold a mirror up to the 2020s, it will need to harness the nihilistic atmosphere surrounding us, which stands in stark contrast to the idealistic certainty of the 1990s.

When it first debuted in September 1993, The X-Files embraced a culture that was simmering with anti-establishment sentiment and provided validation to UFO believers (and the merely UFO-curious) that their suspicions were on point.

And why not? The 1990s were full of revelations about government deceptions regarding unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP). For example, in 1994, the US Air Force released the Roswell Report, which exposed the famous 1947 crash at Roswell as a shattered balloon from the classified Project Mogul — an origin story that government authorities had kept secret for decades. Similarly, in 1997, the CIA released a report admitting that the Air Force had lied about sightings of its own spycraft "in order to allay public fears and to protect an extraordinarily sensitive national security project."

In retrospect, it was prescient to home in on these lurking conspiracies, though obviously the show embellished their scale. While the original series owes much of its popularity to its superb cast and writers, it didn't hurt that its core premise seemed to keep manifesting in real life, confirming popular suspicions about deep state cover-ups and the allure of the supernatural.

Today, conspiracies about aliens are so ubiquitous that they are often embraced even by government representatives — just look at the salacious Congressional hearings on the topic in recent years. The reboot has a lot of rich new material to address with the rise of conspiracy peddling, celebrity politicians, and the distortion of reality in an age of deepfakes and AI slop.

Since news of an X-Files reboot hit the Hollywood trades, the ground has shifted even more, unclear in which direction. On May 8th, 2026, the Pentagon launched PURSUE, the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters, a dedicated government portal at war.gov/ufo hosting the first tranche of declassified UAP files in U.S. history. The release followed President Trump's February 2026 executive order directing federal agencies to identify and declassify all records related to UFOs, UAP, and extraterrestrial life. The order established a 300-day countdown and called for a UAP Records Review Board modeled on the JFK Assassination Records Review Board.

The first batch included over 160 "declassified files" and more than 400 documented incidents spanning the 1940s through 2026 — photographs, videos, military flight records, astronaut observations, and witness testimony from across the federal government. Almost everything related to Apollo was already on the Internet for years, and it immediately hurt the credibility of Trump's directive.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called it a step toward "maximum transparency." FBI Director Kash Patel said it marked the first time the public could access UAP-related government files without barriers. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman pledged continued candor about what is and isn't known. And yet, the reaction was strikingly muted.

Many UFO/UAP enthusiasts expressed confusion at the inclusion of already-circulated material and ambiguous imagery. Scientists noted that much of it was explainable as camera artifacts, balloons, or unreliable eyewitness accounts. Even Marjorie Taylor Greene, one of the most vocal Congressional UAP advocates, waved it off: "Unless they roll out live aliens and test demo UFOs or actually admit what we know this really is, then I have way better things to do on this Friday."

This is exactly the narrative landscape Coogler's reboot should interrogate. The government is now actively releasing its UFO files — not hiding them. The old X-Files mythology hinged on a shadowy state that concealed the truth at all costs. But what happens when the state dumps thousands of pages onto a .gov website, and nobody knows what to make of it? When disclosure is no longer withheld but drowned out by noise?

This is further complicated by the broader arc of Congressional UAP activity since 2023, when intelligence officer David Grusch testified under oath that the U.S. government possesses retrieved non-human craft and biologics — allegations the Pentagon has repeatedly denied.

That testimony spawned years of legislative maneuvering: the Schumer-Rounds UAP Disclosure Act, which was gutted before passage; the House Oversight Committee's dedicated Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets; and bipartisan provisions embedded in successive National Defense Authorization Acts pushing for transparency. The UAP Transparency Act, introduced in the 119th Congress, would mandate that all federal agencies declassify their UAP holdings. State legislatures have even gotten involved — Connecticut introduced its own UAP study bill in early 2026.

The cumulative effect is a political and media environment in which UFOs are no longer on the fringes.

They are the subject of executive orders, Congressional hearings, Pentagon press briefings, and prime-time cable news. For Coogler's reboot, this is both a gift and a creative challenge. The show can no longer rely on the novelty of suggesting the government knows more than it's telling us. Everyone already assumes that.

The new dramatic question is: What do you do when the floodgates open and the water is murky?

Dana Scully inspired so many young women to pursue STEM careers that the phenomenon is now known as the "Scully effect." With her deadpan humor and self-assured competence, Scully reflected a broader embrace of professional women in 1990s pop culture.

Though the archetype of an independent woman has inspired backlash since the dawn of time, it is particularly heated in 2026. The U.S. Vice President disparaged "childless cat ladies" as a cause of the nation's ills, there is talk of a nefarious Great Feminization, and the far-right is enraptured with the idea of repealing the 19th Amendment.

In addition, xenophobia is at a fever pitch. The mere word "diversity" is verboten to the current U.S. administration. Government websites that honor the contributions of women and minorities in many sectors have been erased. These themes were recently tightly woven into Coogler's Sinners.

Throughout his past work, Coogler has demonstrated a keen ability to channel racial injustice, gender paradigms, and the realities of multicultural life into exciting and even joyful stories. He knows how to play off the omnipresent desire to resurrect hierarchies of the past without making it sound like a lecture. If Scully inspired women of the 1990s to pursue their dream careers, perhaps Coogler can light up a beacon for a new generation of young people who are understandably struggling to find their place in a hostile world.

Coogler's reboot now has faces.

In February, Danielle Deadwyler was cast as the female lead — not as Dana Scully, but as a wholly new FBI agent assigned to reopen the bureau's long-shuttered division devoted to unexplained phenomena. In March, Himesh Patel was announced as her partner, completing the show's new believer-skeptic, odd couple, "will they or won't they" pairing.

Deadwyler called the project something that is "cooking slowly and with lots of flavor."

The pilot is now filming in Vancouver (the same city that served as the backdrop for the original series' first five seasons in the '90s), and has gathered serious talent: Oscar winner Amy Madigan (the witch from Weapons), Steve Buscemi, and Ben Foster, among other familiar faces.

Devery Jacobs and Tantoo Cardinal from Reservation Dogs has also joined the show in important supporting roles and these early casting details hint that the pilot may revolve around an investigation connected to Indigenous communities — a themes explored in the original series' most ambitious mythology episodes: "Anasazi" and "The Blessing Way," but now filtered through the lens of filmmakers and performers with direct cultural connection to the material.

Behind the camera, Coogler has assembled his trusted crew: Oscar-winning cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw, VFX supervisor Michael Ralla, and casting director Francine Maisler—all Sinners veterans. Jennifer Yale serves as showrunner. Chris Carter, the franchise's creator, is on board as a non-writing executive producer, extending the creative heritage without handcuffs.

Gillian Anderson, who is still revered as an icon, has read the pilot and hasn't been shy about her enthusiasm. "The pilot script is really good," she said at Awesome Con in March. "Have an open mind and give it a chance, because it's gonna be f---ing cool. It really is." She confirmed having had "a few conversations" with Coogler and has previously told him she's open to returning in some capacity.

David Duchovny, who still carries Mulder's quiet aura, spoke to Coogler and has a "general sense" of the project, but hasn't read the script. "I don't know what the world of his show is," he told The Hollywood Reporter. "I don't know if my character exists in that show. It's all hypothetical to me, so I can't really address it." He confirmed there have been "talks about certain things" but stressed that "there's nothing concrete at this point."

Whether Mulder and Scully surface as mentors, Easter eggs, or not at all, the torch is being passed deliberately. Coogler knows the weight of legacy, as he successfully soft-rebooted the Rocky franchise through Creed and took charge of an entire cinematic universe with Black Panther. He understands that reverence and reinvention are not mutually exclusive.

The original X-Files was born in an era when conspiracy theories were a form of dissent.

Today, conspiracy theories are often the official story, amplified by elected officials and monetized by media ecosystems built to reward paranoia. The burden of curiosity has inverted. In the 1990s, it took courage to question an authority on behalf of the crowd. In the 2020s, it takes courage to question the crowd on behalf of an authority. Mulder's worldview is mainstream, while Scully's has been pushed to the margins.

That inversion is the richest possible soil for a new X-Files.

Coogler is uniquely positioned to ask what happens to a society that has replaced the pursuit of truth with the performance of belief. What does it mean to investigate the unknown when everyone already thinks they know it?

The X-Files once taught a generation that the truth was worth chasing. If Coogler gets this right, the reboot might teach a new one that the truth is worth verifying.