Steven Spielberg premiered a new trailer for Disclosure Day at CinemaCon on Wednesday, signaling a return to summer blockbuster filmmaking after a decade largely spent on personal dramas and prestige fare. The footage showed Emily Blunt and Josh O’Connor racing through a farmhouse as government agents closed in, then scrambling onto a speeding train.
The trailer also offered fleeting glimpses of the aliens themselves, along with a ship beginning to materialize out of an ink-black sky and a nonhuman hand reaching up to caress a face. Spielberg, who wrote the film with David Koepp, said the sci-fi premise was “closer to truth” than many people might think. He added, “I’ve been curious ever since I was a little kid with what was happening in the night sky.”
Blunt plays a weather reporter with a connection to otherworldly visitors, while O’Connor plays a man with evidence that humanity has made contact. Colin Firth appears as a bureaucrat determined to keep the heroes from going public, with Eve Hewson and Colman Domingo also in the ensemble cast. The setup turns a familiar invasion story into a conspiracy thriller, and Spielberg leaned into that mood with the warning, “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.”
The film arrives with a layer of real-world resonance. Spielberg referenced a 2017 New York Times report on a secret Pentagon program to investigate UFO sightings, and said, “The world became more accepting of the fact that we probably are not alone.” That connection helps explain why the project has been kept under wraps so tightly, even as it is framed as one of his biggest commercial swings in years.
CinemaCon also gave Spielberg a different kind of spotlight. Motion Picture Association CEO Charlie Rivkin presented him with the America 250 award, and it was the filmmaker’s first visit to the exhibition industry trade show. Spielberg also used the moment to press studios to keep movies in theaters longer before sending them to home entertainment platforms, praising Universal for extending its releases from as few as 17 days to 45. “All you need to get from beginning to end is a seat belt,” he said, before adding, “I promise you this will not be my last.” The message was clear: Disclosure Day is not just a comeback, it is Spielberg making the case that the biggest movies still belong on the biggest screens.
