AirLockAlpha.com

Here's one that no one expected: The next X-Files movie is going to come out before the new Star Trek movie. Talk about a race to the silver screen.

Twentieth Century Fox officially announced that "The X-Files 2" is in pre-production, and that it should be revealing its truths to movie audiences by July 25.

Returning to the film are David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson as Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, the FBI investigators who looked into mysterious and somewhat unexplained events between 1993 and 2002 on Fox. At the same time, there was an overall story involving aliens, abducted sisters and a man who smoked a cigarette.

The movie will be directed by series creator Chris Carter, who also wrote the screenplay along with fellow former "X-Files" executive producer Frank Spotnitz. The movie will come out almost a decade after the first film, which was produced while the series was still on the air.

Not much is known about the new movie except that it will not be a part of the overall mythology of the series, and instead will be a standalone mystery. It's also said, according to SciFi Wire, to take the relationship between Mulder and Scully in "unexpected directions."