With Backrooms and Obsession still holding screens and Spider-Man looming, Steven pielberg’s most ambitious and fun alien film yet has a narrow window to prove itself.
One of the beautiful things about watching American auteurs like Martin Scorsese, Spike Lee, and yes, Steven Spielberg, grow in their field is marveling at the themes they return to. It’s to the point where you can’t think of a proper mafia film without looking at Scorsese’s Goodfellas or Casino, then seeing how he returned to the scene of the crime with The Irishman to revisit those tales through a different lens. Spike Lee is one of the quintessential New York directors, bringing a gritty beauty to the Big Apple through Do the Right Thing, Crooklyn, and 25th Hour, among others. Spielberg? The man who brought us Jaws, numerous Indiana Jones films, Jurassic Park, and more? Extraterrestrials. An early classic, 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind was his first examination of what was going on past our chunk of the galaxy, a passion project of his and Columbia Pictures’ most successful film at the time. Five years later, Spielberg revisited the concept with E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, an idea Columbia foolishly passed on. E.T. — a film about a group of kids who hid an extraterrestrial being from their parents, and fed it candy and rode bikes until E.T.’s parents came to pick them up — became the highest-grossing film of all time, a feat Spielberg held until 1994, when Jurassic Park beat E.T.‘s record. E.T. was just as magnificent as Close Encounters, visually, exploring humans interacting with — and accepting the reality of — beings from the far reaches of the cosmos.
Over Spielberg’s 60-plus-year career as a filmmaker, he’s mastered many of the elements of epic filmmaking. We’ve seen him create amusement parks filled with ferocious dinosaurs, bring unidentified flying objects to Earth, and allow Indiana Jones the superhuman strength to survive every pitfall, rolling boulder, and gunshot thrown his way. After telling a multitude of tales, Spielberg is returning to extraterrestrials in 2026 with Disclosure Day, starring Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor, Colin Firth, and Colman Domingo in Spielberg’s most ambitious alien tale to date.
If you’ve seen the Disclosure Day trailers, you’ve mostly been given scenes of deer and other assorted animals walking into people’s homes, that one sequence of Blunt’s character speaking in some foreign tongue during a TV weather broadcast, Firth being hooked up to machines in some lab, and other assorted shots of people in peril. True to that, Spielberg doesn’t waste time setting up anything. Disclosure Day drops you into the middle of some action, stumbling upon Daniel Kellner (O’Connor), who we learn in the trailer is “a part of it now” — that “it” being a corporation at the heart of suppressing information on extraterrestrial activity on Earth from the public. That information shouldn’t shock you; again, Spielberg has been asking these questions regarding extraterrestrials and their activity on Earth since Close Encounters. Is he reheating his nachos a bit? Sure, but it’s Spielberg, and in a film titled Disclosure Day, buckling in and going along for the journey before the “reveal” is the whole point.
That journey finds Spielberg, frankly, having a lot of fun. At one point in the film, Margaret Fairchild — the aforementioned woman speaking in tongues that Blunt portrays — finally links up with Kellner, speeding away in a car from Wardex and everyone else as they try to figure out next steps. One Wardex employee, Boyd (portrayed by Henry Lloyd-Hughes), is in hot pursuit and finds the couple stopped, waiting for a train to pass. He rams their car, forcing it closer and closer into the cavalcade of train wheels whizzing by. Earlier, as Kellner was making his escape from Wardex employees, Spielberg’s camera races alongside — and across from — Kellner, darting in and out of a wooden fence with some well-placed openings. Disclosure Day isn’t supposed to be an action thriller, but Spielberg must have enjoyed sticking Margaret and Kellner into these harrowing predicaments amid their confusion over what was actually happening to them.
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The cast of Disclosure Day all showed up for Spielberg, including Colin Firth as the stern Wardex head intent on quashing any information that might reach the public. Domingo, just as he did in the Euphoria series finale, carries the project when needed. Hugo Wakefield (Domingo) is that calm, all-knowing voice — the kind of person you’d want in your ear when everything in your life was falling apart. Blunt, in particular, shines. There’s a calmness she lends to her portrayal of Margaret, a woman in the middle of a life-altering situation that one can’t simply explain, only experience.
That experience — or rather, the reaction to that experience — may be where Disclosure Day lives or dies. Spielberg’s a legend, your favorite director’s favorite director. It’s 2026, though. Even as Obsession and Backrooms continue to dominate the late-spring box office, are today’s moviegoing audiences ready for original alien IP of this magnitude? Not a Men in Black or an Independence Day, but a more grounded mystery that appears to be the catalyst that woke a nation. The film, in that sense, could drive an increase in searches for documented extraterrestrial phenomena, be it Area 51 or Roswell. That may all come down to whether you’re actually inclined to watch a new Spielberg film in 2026 that questions what we’ve been told about these beings.
With projections of $65 million worldwide for Disclosure Day‘s opening weekend and an audience that may not be as connected to Spielberg’s legacy as generations past, the film could face an uphill battle, with theaters still running Backrooms and Obsession. It may actually be more interesting to see, post-opening weekend, whether word of mouth is enough to carry a strong second weekend. There are only so many calendar days before Spider-Man swings back into theaters. It’s hard to tell if Spielberg’s latest alien trick will be enough.
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