John Bartley described how the show's frame was made in two sentences, in a 2011 Kodak interview: "We shot The X Files in Super 35 format and framed for 4:3." And then: "We protected for 16:9, because we knew it was coming." The verbs matter. One frame was framed. The other was protected, which on a set means kept clear of lamps, stands and the boom. A protected frame has nothing wrong in it, which is a lower bar than being composed.
Almost every copy of the series in circulation today is the protected one. That history gets misremembered, so here it is in order. The DVD sets of the first four seasons were full frame; the season five set in 2002 was the first presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen, and the later seasons followed. In 2015 the post house Illuminate rescanned the run from the camera-original negatives, and the remaster began reaching Netflix that April in 16:9 high definition, starting with the first thirteen hours of season one. The pilot, the one episode without that protection, turned up there with its 4:3 picture cropped to fit the wider window. The 55-disc Blu-ray collector's set arrived on December 8, 2015, with the entire run at 1.78:1 and no option for the original ratio on any season. Blu-ray.com's reviewer, who liked the set, put the trade plainly: the sides "have been opened up marginally," and "there is often material missing from the tops and bottoms of shots." Since January 1 all eleven seasons have been free on Pluto TV in the United States, 218 episodes on demand and on a 24/7 channel, an arrangement Collider noted again on October 14, ahead of the Hulu series. I have not found a streaming service anywhere that offers the first nine seasons at 4:3.
The case against the reframe is usually made as a purity argument, and purity arguments lose. The better case is mechanical. Open the sides a little and trim the top and bottom, and you have changed the frame mostly in one direction, the vertical, and the vertical is the axis this show worked on.
Up and down
A 4:3 frame is tall relative to its width, and the series treated that height as a resource. The first monster hour, Squeeze, written by Glen Morgan and James Wong and aired September 24, 1993, is built on a man who travels where buildings are tall and narrow: Eugene Tooms, in one reviewer's phrase, "extending down chimneys and through ducts." The threat arrives from above. The sequel, Tooms, ends with him sucked into an escalator, a machine whose whole function is vertical. The pilot's teaser puts its light directly overhead. The flashlight, carried at waist or shoulder height and pointed ahead and slightly down, draws a wedge that runs from the hand to the floor, and the shot that holds both the hand and the floor is a tall shot.
Then the doorways. The series' standard image of a stranger is a figure rimmed from behind in a door, face unlit. A standing body in a door fills a 4:3 frame from the lintel to the sill with a strip of wall on each side. Give that frame more width and the figure keeps its height while the wall grows; the person becomes smaller as a share of the picture, and a silhouette that was a wall of dark becomes a dark shape in a room. Take the top off instead and the lintel goes, and with it the sense that the figure has entered a space with a ceiling. Either way you are looking at a paraphrase of the composition.
The same arithmetic touches the show's most repeated shot, the two-shot. A tall man and a short woman standing close is a difficult pair to frame at any ratio, and 4:3 solved it by forcing the camera in: two heads at different heights, a little air on top. In a wider frame the pair sits in more room, and the remaster's room is horizontal, so the gap between the heads reads as distance while the headroom above them is what gets spent. On a show that spent nine years arguing that these two people were closer than they would admit, that headroom was where the frame held them together.
"There is often material missing from the tops and bottoms of shots."
None of this means the widescreen picture is incompetent. The reviewer who wrote that sentence found the work careful, and Bartley's crews kept the margins clean enough that the new edges hold up, as this site's essay on the Los Angeles move noted in passing. The remaster is a sound 16:9 photograph of sets that had been staged for 4:3. The staging is the thing you cannot rescan.
The show that was composed wide
The revival is the useful control. The 2016 event series was shot in Vancouver on Arri Alexa cameras with Panavision lenses, the 2018 season, photographed by Craig Wrobleski, also on the Alexa, and both were mastered at 1.78:1 as native widescreen; the Blu-rays carry that ratio as the original. Garfield Whitman, the associate producer who ran post on the event series, told Post there was "virtually no grain in the digital era." The revival hours look like good contemporary drama, and part of why is that their width is native. Nobody stands in a doorway as if the doorway were the frame. The camera stays back, the rooms are wide, and the dread, where it arrives, arrives across the picture rather than down it. Watching a revival episode after a remastered one from 1995 is the quickest way to feel the difference between a widescreen frame and a tall frame wearing one.
Coogler's two shapes
Which brings the question to the director Hulu has hired. Ryan Coogler shot Fruitvale Station on Super 16, a format he chose, by his cinematographer Rachel Morrison's account, for its grain, and then did not shoot on film again until Sinners. For that picture he and Autumn Durald Arkapaw combined 5-perf 65mm Ultra Panavision, which projects at 2.76:1, with 15-perf 65mm Imax at 1.43:1, according to American Cinematographer; the Imax material came to about a fifth of the film, more than they had planned, and the rest was composed natively at 2.76:1. Coogler's reasoning was landscape. The Delta, he told the magazine, is "horizon and crops as far as the eye can see," and the wide frame carried "the paranoia that isolation can bring." He had the equipment tested somewhere flat to try what he called his horizon theory.
Two things in that account bear on an X-File. The first is that the one shape in Coogler's recent kit that resembles the old show's frame is the Imax one. A 1.43:1 picture is close to a 4:3 television set, the shape the remaster retired, and Coogler and Arkapaw reserved it for the passages they wanted to land hardest, then shot more of it than planned. The second is what Arkapaw said about protecting the other ratio. Because most theaters would show the whole film at 2.76:1, she framed on set with that in mind: "I like to frame actors and what's most important in the center." That is Bartley's method run backward. In 1993 the tall frame was composed and the wide one kept clean. In 2025 the tall frame was composed for a fifth of the picture and delivered wide to most of the audience, with the actors centered so the reframe would survive. Arkapaw knows exactly what a reframe costs. She has now photographed the Hulu pilot; what she shot it on, and at what ratio, has not been announced, and the 65mm claim circulating since July remains a blog report.
The question worth asking is narrower than "will the new show be widescreen." Of course it will be delivered to a 16:9 screen; everything is. The question is whether Coogler composes for that rectangle or, as he did on Sinners, for a taller one and lets the rectangle be the protected frame. If the first, the Hulu series joins the revival as a show composed wide, and the original's vertical grammar stays where the remaster left it, trimmed. If the second, a director famous for wide horizons will have arrived, by his own route, at something close to the frame Bartley composed in Vancouver and could not keep. Bartley protected a frame for a future he expected. Coogler, if he composes tall, would be protecting one for a present that watches on a phone held sideways.
Until there is a frame to look at, the only reliable way to see the series as it was composed is the format Fox left behind with the season five set in 2002: the full-frame DVDs of the first four seasons, standard definition, soft, and complete to the ceiling.