Despite the fact that the new film was well advertised (high volume… trailers weren’t so good) on television and the Internet (I couldn’t visit a site in the past week without seeing an ad for it), the new X-Files film was a flop, bringing in a mere $10 million.

Here’s a breakdown for this weekend’s box office:

The Dark Knight – $75.6M
Step Brothers – $30M
Mamma Mia! – $17.9M
The X-Files: I Want to Believe – $10.2M
Journey to the Center of the Earth – $9.41M

According to IMDB, The X-Files: I Want to Believe cost roughly $30 million to make. That’s pretty tame compared to a lot of other films, and I have no doubt that it’ll make a profit eventually. DVD sales, alone, will bring in a lot of cash, especially if they release the film on regular DVD as well as BluRay.

I didn’t go see the movie, and by the looks of it, a lot of other X-Files fans didn’t either. Trailers are in a large part responsible for getting people to the theater and whomever was responsible for doing them for The X-Files should lose their job… they weren’t engaging in the least bit.

Still, I’m hoping this won’t doom the chances of another film. David Duchovny said he’s ready for another X-Files movie, but I don’t know if creator Chris Carter has another good story left in him.

Anytime an actor plays a single character for this long (eight seasons thus far), the odds of him/her wanting a change is only natural. Most shows don’t last this long, but we’ve seen a few walk away in the past — David Duchovny comes to mind, when he wanted out of Chris Carter’s The X-Files.

I’ve been a huge fan of the show from the very beginning. The pilot episode drew me right in and I’ve been hooked. It’s just too bad there are a hundred CSI knockoffs polluting the airwaves now.

Personally, I welcome the move. I think it’s about time that this be done and over with already. The whole question of “will he go” or “when will he go” has been a distraction for the last two years in my view.

William Peterson as Gil Grissom

I think the show could use some fresh blood. The series has gotten very stale as far as the characters go. Anything remotely interesting only happens at the end of the season when someone’s contract is about to expire and the writers aren’t sure what’s going to happen. The cases are still good — the miniature story arc was absolutely awesome, but the character development has become… boring to say the least.

Seeing Grissom go will hopefully be the catalyst for some big changes. We’ve already learned of some of what the next season has in store for us…

Gary Dourdan will be in the premiere of the ninth season, but the producers aren’t yet tipping their hand as to whether or not his character, Warrick Brown, will die or not. I think he probably will, but I really don’t like the idea of literally killing off characters, at least on a show like this. It may be more fitting on a show like Lost, where people are frankly expected to die.

Jorja Fox (Sara Sidle) will be back for a few episodes, but we don’t know exactly how many.

Previously-announced addition Lauren Lee Smith (The L Word) joins the cast in the third episode as new CSI Riley Adams. Not being mentored by Grissom should make her stand out from the rest. She’ll be more or less replacing the already-departed Jorja Fox.

Liz Vassey and David Berman’s characters (Wendy and David) will become full-fledged CSIs and Wallace Langham (Hodges) will also become more prominent. Frankly, I think Hodges is already a bigger part of the show than he needs to be sometimes.

And then there’s Grissom’s replacement. All we know for now is that a professor will come into play at some point in this season, during a two-episode case and he’ll be a consultant who helps the CSIs bring in the culprit. He’ll eventually become Grissom’s replacement. We don’t know who the actor will be, however. Kurt Russell, Laurence Fishburne and John Malkovich are said to be at the top of CBS’ wish list, but it looks like Malkovich won’t be able to do it due to scheduling conflicts. That’s quite a wish list if you ask me.

Season nine of CSI should be an interesting one.

I was hoping for some of that great writing would come into play here, thinking that maybe Roday would have a hand in the script like he does on PSYCH. Looking back, however, even if he did help write an occasional joke, this episode was never going to get very much praise from me.

Roday and Lawson wondering why they agreed to do this show.

The fact that Roday and Lawson are dating in real life makes this episode all the better. Yeah, this is a horror series, but you know they must have had a little fun with it in-between takes.

It didn’t take long for me to have some serious doubts about this episode. In fact, it was about the same time that Samantha received the note that things went south. Why would she believe such an outrageous thing in the first place? Why would she act the way she did?

James Roday, who played Carlos, was just terrible to watch. I don’t blame him for it; it’s the writing, not the acting. He played a psychopath through most of the episode, and for no reason. I had a hard time believing much of what happened in this episode. It was really tough to stomach. Everything was unbelievable.

I was pretty pissed when the big twist was revealed. An entire hour was dedicated to setting up a huge plot twist, revealing Lawson’s character, Samantha, as the real serial killer. If this plot were that of a movie, I would have demanded my money back. Why must this entire series be entirely composed of M. Night Shyamalan-style twists, revealed in the last one or two scenes?

One or two more episodes like this one, and NBC should pull the plug on this suck-fest.

On a lighter note, The X-Files veteran William B. Davis had a role in the episode. I haven’t seen him in anything in quite a while. It was good to see him again.

Rating: 4.0

The science-fiction genre has a little bit of everything in it, but quite often, aliens, outer-space, and space travel all tend to come to mind when thinking about science fiction, and this sort of bugs me. There’s more to sci-fi than aliens and space. Most of the sci-fi shows that are on aren’t something I’m watching, for one reason or another. The last great sci-fi series I watched from beginning to end was The X-Files. Incredibly successful, The X-Files had a wide-array of episodes, dealing with everything from government conspiracies and aliens to monsters-of-the-week.

I recently had the opportunity to view a screener for the new J.J. Abrams series, Fringe, and I am completely psyched about this show now. The ONLY show that came to mind when watching this was Chris Carter’s The X-Files. Instead of aliens and outer-space, Fringe looks to focus on the large field of fringe science, which is where the show derives its name.

I’m not going to go into every detail of what the screener showed, but I will give you a little overview. The series begins with an airliner full of passengers arriving in the U.S. and all of the people onboard are found dead. Their skin has melted off, more or less, and the FBI, CIA, and CDC are called in to investigate.

Much of the focus is on two FBI agents, played by Anna Torv and Mark Valley. Despite department policies restricting them from having a relationship, they are seeing one another outside of work. Torv’s character, Olivia Dunham, is really the main character in the series; she drives the story. Though controlling, she’s very likable.

Once one of the FBI agents gets infected with whatever substance made the passengers sick, the feds track down every lead imaginable, going to insane lengths to get information on the person responsible. They even bring an institutionalized doctor in from the cold, along with his son. The son, played by Joshua Jackson, was an impressive character. I initially thought he’d be just a con-artist with no knowledge about science, but I was pleasantly surprised when he seemed to be able to help his genius father with his work. Though the constant sarcastic wise-cracks he made got old after a while.

There is also a vast conspiracy at work. This is one of the reasons I bring up The X-Files, which had its share of conspiracy moments. I haven’t seen a show quite like this in a long time. There is a great deal of potential with this series. With J.J. Abrams serving as creator and executive producer, I hope he learns from one of his other hits, Lost, and sets and end-date to this show. The X-Files dragged on for too long, and Lost would have too, but the smartest thing the producers did was set an end-date. They should do the same for Fringe. It looks like it’s going to have the same sort of success that The X-Files did, but it does have a lifespan. Let’s face it, some shows are very open ended, but others, like Lost or Fringe, have a particular story to tell, and that story should be carefully crafted and laid out. It shouldn’t go on and on until the show is no longer profitable like some shows do.

All that being said, I haven’t been this excited about seeing a show in quite a while. Burn Notice was close, but here, I see Fringe being on a network station and having a huge appeal, not just hardcore science fiction fans. We’ll be covering this series when it begins airing on September 9th.

Yahoo now has the second trailer for the movie. It’s exclusive to them for the time being.

The second trailer isn’t that much different from the first. The trailer’s editor(s) reused a lot of the content from the first, but did add some more substantive scenes, like those involving Scottish actor and comedian Billy Connolly and the sexy Amanda Peet.

I thought the second trailer was an improvement, but I feel that this should have been the first version. I’m a big fan of the X-Files TV series and the first movie, so a trailer isn’t needed to convince me to see the new film. But what I want from the first trailer is something that’s going to really surprise me, and that surprise is gone now that it took Fox two trailers to get their message out. A movie should never need more than one movie trailer.

Gillian Anderson said that the six-year gap between the series and movie made it difficult to get back into character. I don’t doubt that for a second. She and David Duchovny talked about how to make it clear that the characters had gotten older but were still the same people. I don’t know how they are going to pull that off, but I’m open to just about anything.

I hope the sequel (whatever the final name ends up being) is a hit and that a third movie is made. It’s been a long time since the last movie. Mulder and Scully will always be two of my all-time favorite characters.