Nobody has done more for extra-terrestrial PR than Steven Spielberg.
Even before he hit paydirt with blockbuster smashes “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”, “ET” and “War of the Worlds”, the filmmaker’s rookie, teenage self was watching the skies in “Firelight” (1964), the first movie he directed. He’s since described the latter as “one of the five worst films ever made” — a claim we can’t verify, seeing as only a few minutes of footage still exist — but it proves how long the director has been interested in little green men. (Other extra-terrestrial archetypes are, of course, available.)
A new Spielberg alien movie is therefore always going to be worth getting excited about, though that’s not the only reason “Disclosure Day” feels like the most important sci-fi movie release of 2026.
Along with Christopher Nolan, JJ Abrams and — following the success of last year’s brilliant, genre-bending “Sinners” — arguably Ryan Coogler as well, Spielberg is now one of the few filmmakers in Hollywood with the commercial clout to make an original, standalone genre movie with blockbuster scale. (“Project Hail Mary” is another exception that proves the rule, though that did arrive with the advantage of being based on Andy Weir’s already-beloved bestselling novel.)
It hasn’t always been this way. Although the 21st century box office charts have been dominated by mega-franchises such as Marvel, DC, Star Wars and Harry Potter — not to mention James Cameron’s extended mission to Pandora — you don’t have to go back too far to find a time when original sci-fi movies were a significant force in Hollywood.
“Independence Day”, “Men in Black”, “Armageddon” and “The Matrix” were all among the top 20 highest-grossing films of the 1990s, as were “Ghost”, “Forrest Gump” and “Home Alone”. All of them achieved their success without relying on prior audience awareness, yet would be the outliers at the modern box office, just as likely to debut on a streaming platform as in multiplexes.
They’d certainly struggle to compete with existing intellectual property (IP) behemoths like the MCU, in a Hollywood machine that’s become increasingly risk-averse. But as Marvel and pretty much every other brand has discovered in recent years, no franchise — except, perhaps, “Avatar” — is a guaranteed banker. And if you bet everything on a limited number of pre-existing franchises, you’re left with a vacuum if/when they start to fail.
It’s a state of affairs that hasn’t been lost on Spielberg who, aside from sequels to his own “Jurassic Park” and “Indiana Jones” movies, has tended to steer well clear of franchise filmmaking.
“If all we make is known, branded IP, we’re going to run out of gas,” Spielberg told CinemaCon in April (via Variety). “There is nothing more important than giving the audience visual stories, and they can be in any form, but we need to tell more original stories.”
The desire for original stories is as much about the moviegoing experience as combatting existential threats to Hollywood. There’s something exhilarating about sitting in a theater and not being entirely sure what you’re about to see — an air of mystery Spielberg has done his damnedest to generate ahead of “Disclosure Day”.
Until last December, it was simply known as Steven Spielberg’s untitled UFO movie. We all knew that the legendary director was plotting a return to his alien visitation happy place, of course, but — aside from the identity of its stars, and the involvement of screenwriter David Koepp — nobody was exactly sure what form “Disclosure Day” was going to take.
Remarkably, six months later, he’s managed to keep most of his movie’s secrets out of the public eye. We know the story involves a push to disclose information about alien visitation, a government conspiracy to suppress it, and a creepy, clicky alien language, but not much beyond that.
Of course, non-disclosure agreements and copy-resistant scripts have become so commonplace in a paranoid Hollywood that you’d think the major studios were planning a significant military operation. Even remakes and adaptations of centuries-old novels are kept away from prying eyes, forgetting that everybody can look up the ending of every story ever told on Wikipedia. There’s certainly no expectation that we do our “homework” in advance of seeing this self-contained, non-franchise film.
Indeed, a key point of difference with “Disclosure Day” is that we can’t hunt for clues in existing comic books, expanded universes or previous stories. Assuming advance reviews keep key plot points on the QT, intel is currently limited to what a heavily media-trained cast and crew have divulged (or not) in interviews and teaser footage. And while the “final” “Disclosure Day” trailer shows off a little more of the aliens than we might have liked, these are hardly spoilers to rival Hulk catching a stricken Iron Man in promos for the first “Avengers”.
Inevitably, this information vacuum has encouraged some pretty out-there speculation. Some have suggested that “Disclosure Day” might be a 49-years-later sequel to “Close Encounters”, while others have theorized that the US government has chosen Spielberg as a conduit to tell the public that aliens really do exist.
While those particular conspiracy theorists may have watched a few too many episodes of “The X Files”, there’s little question that Spielberg is out on his own when it comes to generating pre-release hype for a standalone blockbuster — even though the last two decades of his career have been dominated by less mainstream fare such as “Bridge of Spies”, “War Horse”, “Lincoln” and the semi-autobiographical “The Fabelmans”.
When it comes to marshalling blockbuster action, only Cameron is in the same league, while every Spielberg movie — even the more forgettable ones — tends to have moments of bona fide movie magic. It’s also impossible to look past the fact that “Disclosure Day” is the latest entry in a sequence that explores the good and bad sides of alien visitation via two all-time classics (“Close Encounters” and “ET”), and three quarters of one (“War of the Worlds“). Spielberg also produced Abrams’ wonderful homage, “Super 8”.
In other words, one of the greatest directors of all time is back on home turf, so — even if the new movie can’t quite match its predecessors — it’s guaranteed to be worth talking about. Ironic for a film about keeping secrets…
‘Disclosure Day’ is in theaters from June 10 in the UK and June 12 in the US.
