Spielberg Returns to UFOs with Disclosure Day — and Brings John Williams Along

Almost Fifty Years Later

Steven Spielberg hasn’t made a UFO movie since Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977. He’s circled the genre — E.T. flipped the alien script into a suburban fairy tale, War of the Worlds went full apocalypse — but he hasn’t returned to the question that launched his career: what happens when we find out we’re not alone? Disclosure Day, arriving June 12 in IMAX, is that return.

The full trailer, released March 12, shows Josh O’Connor as a man who stumbles onto classified government proof of extraterrestrial life and decides the world deserves to know. Emily Blunt plays a Kansas City meteorologist who starts speaking in tongues on live television — one of several eerie signals that something is unraveling. Colin Firth rounds out the central trio as the man trying to keep the secret buried.

The Band is Back Together

What makes Disclosure Day feel like more than another sci-fi blockbuster is the team behind it. David Koepp, who wrote Jurassic Park and War of the Worlds for Spielberg, handles the screenplay from Spielberg’s own original story. Janusz Kamiński, Spielberg’s cinematographer since Schindler’s List, is behind the camera. And John Williams — at 94 — is composing the score, marking their 30th collaboration. That number deserves a moment: no director-composer partnership in cinema history comes close.

The trailer leans into atmosphere over spectacle. There are no alien reveals, no city-leveling set pieces — just eyes, animals behaving strangely, and a growing sense that the people who know the truth are being hunted for it. It’s closer to a paranoid thriller than an invasion film, which is exactly the register where Spielberg tends to do his most interesting work.

A Slow-Burn Marketing Campaign

Universal has played this one carefully. A cryptic teaser in December 2025 revealed almost nothing. The Super Bowl LX spot in February offered the first glimpse of a spacecraft. Now the full trailer fills in the human story while still keeping the aliens entirely off-screen. The campaign mirrors the film’s own premise — disclosure as a slow, controlled drip rather than a single explosive reveal.

Fans have already started speculating that Disclosure Day might be a stealth sequel to Close Encounters, with some pointing to visual echoes and thematic callbacks in the trailer. Spielberg hasn’t confirmed or denied it, which only fuels the theory.

Why It Matters

There’s a version of this movie that plays it safe — Spielberg nostalgia, familiar beats, guaranteed box office. But the trailer suggests something riskier: a conspiracy thriller that treats first contact as a political crisis, not a visual spectacle. At 79, Spielberg has nothing left to prove. That’s usually when directors make their most personal films — or their most self-indulgent ones. The restraint in this trailer suggests Disclosure Day leans toward the former.