Steven Spielberg brought a new trailer for “Disclosure Day” to CinemaCon on Wednesday, unveiling a summer movie built around visitors from another planet and a government conspiracy to hide their arrival. The film marks his return to blockbuster filmmaking after a decade mostly spent on personal dramas and prestige fare.
The footage showed Emily Blunt as a weather reporter with a connection to the otherworldly visitors, while Josh O’Connor played a man who has evidence humanity has made contact. Colin Firth appeared as a bureaucrat determined to keep the pair from going public, with Eve Hewson and Colman Domingo also in the ensemble. Spielberg said the sci-fi premise was “closer to truth” than many people might think, a remark that landed in a room already primed by years of public debate over disclosure and unexplained sightings.
That comment drew a clear line back to 2017, when a New York Times report detailed a secret Pentagon program that investigated UFO sightings. Spielberg said the world had become more accepting of the idea that “we probably are not alone,” and the trailer leaned into that unease with fleeting shots of the aliens themselves. In one sequence, a ship began to materialize out of an ink-black sky. In another, a nonhuman hand reached up to caress a face. Elsewhere, Blunt and O’Connor crashed through a farmhouse while running from government agents, then climbed onto a speeding train.
David Koepp wrote the script, and Spielberg’s own history with UFO stories hangs over the project. He has spent years orbiting the subject, from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” to the new film’s promise of spectacle wrapped in secrecy. The studio has kept the plot tightly guarded, but the trailer made its broad shape plain enough: first contact, then a cover-up, then a scramble to survive long enough to tell the world.
The tension around that story is sharpened by the fact that Spielberg used the CinemaCon stage not only to sell a movie but to weigh in on the business of moviegoing itself. Motion Picture Association CEO Charlie Rivkin presented him with the America 250 award, and Spielberg used the moment to urge Hollywood to keep films in theaters longer before they hit home platforms. Universal, he noted, has already expanded its exclusive theatrical window from as few as 17 days to 45, a shift he praised as the kind of commitment big movies need.
It was Spielberg’s first visit to the exhibition industry trade show, and the reaction to his appearance was warm enough to draw a standing ovation. “I promise you this will not be my last,” he told the crowd. He also told them, “I believe this movie is going to answer questions and this movie is going to cause a lot of people to ask a lot of questions,” then added that “all you need to get from beginning to end is a seat belt.” The answer in his title is already there: “Disclosure Day” is built to turn a long-running American fascination with what is in the sky into a summer event, and Spielberg is betting the theater audience is still ready to buckle in for it.
