In short, says Frank Spotnitz: It was The Dark Knight's fault. Warners' blockbuster, with all its brooding and scares simply claimed too much of the market on gothic fanboy melancholy for X-Files to compete a week after TDK first hijacked the box office. One one hand, it's not the most outlandish claim; few films escaped the Batman Revolution without at least a flesh wound (even Mamma Mia!, which Spotnitz cites among the season's most resilient counter-programming). Yet on the other, we can't help but feel a little embarrassed for a guy this delusional about his 15-year-old pop-cult franchise:

According to Spotnitz, I Want to Believe should have been a hit, based on its quality and on its genre as a scary movie. "Blockbusters, comedies, horror, scary films, these are always going to have a place in the theatre," Spotnitz tells Sun Media.

"Our theatrical performance this past summer notwithstanding, I think The X-Files is still a natural for theatrical release. We just opened the wrong week. The week after The Dark Knight, I think, was just not the right week for us. [...] We were a little dark scary movie coming in the fumes, in the exhaust, of this mammoth machine that was The Dark Knight. And I don't think we had a chance!"

They also didn't have the late Heath Ledger, IMAX, three years between films (as opposed to 10 years, with the previous X-Files film earning $80 million), virtually unanimous critical praise or a Momzo the Clown scandal. As Spotnitz almost certainly knows, it takes a village to make a hit. Literally — just ask the leaders of Batman, Turkey. Come to think of it, we hear they might be looking for co-plaintiffs against Warner Bros. if you think a class-action suit is worth a shot. Think it over.

• Spotnitz believes Dark Knight to blame [Toronto Sun via MCN]

Alas, there they were: David Duchovny, X-Files creator/director Chris Carter, writer/producer Frank Spotnitz and cascades of withering shrieks inside the Majestic Crest. Oh, and two lightly spoilerrific clips — a couple minutes each, the longest sustained orgasm most of the attendees have had since the show went off the air.

And by lightly, we mean lightly: A guy gets it in the face and hand with a trowel, winds up in the snow. Crazy psychic Billy Connelly finds him buried. Enter special agents Mulder and Scully. Brooding follows — lots of it. And that's... all? See you in five weeks!

The rest of the night was pure subterfuge, unless you count Carter's faux-reluctant disclosure of a research trip to, ahem, Cleveland. He would barely talk about his means of secret-keeping, allowing only that his and Spotnitz's paranoia was such that ahead of shooting, department heads were allowed script reads only in a sealed room with a camera trained on them and no notes allowed. Duchovny said he had to beg for a screenplay of his own — a bit of a regression from the first film 10 years ago, when the red, Xerox-proof script pages simply made it hard to read his lines.

Once he got the script, Duchovny was still in the dark as to where Mulder had been since the TV show's run — which was fine by him. "When you look back at when Gillian [Anderson] and I first played the characters in 1993, the idea of trying to be that guy in reruns right now — as much as I'd love to — would be a little embarrassing," he said. "That's probably one of the most interesting things for an actor to try: to embody the same character as time goes by. Not wanting to be a cartoon character frozen in time, but a character who changes in time."

Like... how? "No," Duchovny said, shutting the door on yet another plot thread. "It's one of the reasons I wanted to continue playing this character; I wanted to take him on this journey he started in 1993. ... He's frustrated. He hasn't changed. He's a quester; he's always going to be looking."

To that end, Spotnitz plucked a few hundred gushing audience heartstrings by confessing how much he missed his characters. Duchovny one-upped him, recalling Carter's teariness the day of the first read-through ("Awwww!" again, right on cue) and citing a fan video screened on set north of Vancouver. "I just remember thinking, 'Oh fuck, I've gotta deliver,' " he said.

One fan asked when 20th Century Fox would be delivering on its own end — trailers? Teasers? Commercials? Anything? Indeed, awareness beyond fans isn't especially high, as Spotnitz inferred with Fox brass sitting right in the front row. "We had a big marketing meeting with the studio and they assured us that by July 25 everyone will know about this movie," he said. And in the event they take to it, it's set up for a third edition in the next two to three years.