The $30 million toe in the water

Spielberg's latest film, Disclosure Day, is a grand bookend to his most cosmically-minded moviemaker days, exploring the question of alien life. The film, releasing June 11, stars Josh O'Connor as a cybersecurity whistleblower and Emily Blunt as a meteorologist who begins having a mysterious epiphany.

New York (AP) - A moment early on in Disclosure Day will instinctively feel familiar to anyone who grew up with Steven Spielberg films. A TV weather report predicts hail. The camera pans downward, from television set to kitchen table. Plinking sounds begin . Cereal falls into a bowl.

Spielberg's latest, like some of his earliest and most beloved films, again concerns what might fall from above.

An echo of Sydney's 2024 institutional buy-up

Coming nearly half a century after Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Disclosure Day is a grand bookend for one of the most cosmically-minded moviemakers of our time, whose dreams of extraterrestrial life have shaped all of ours. It's a distant answer to the final notes of Close Encounters.

But while Spielberg grants his 1977 film was speculative, Disclosure Day, he insists, is the real deal. It's my first film that will be considered science fiction that I do not consider to be science fiction, Spielberg said in a recent interview. It's much more reflective of the world as it is evolving and discoveries that are being made as we speak.

Who is the unnamed buyer?

Spielberg, at 79, is trying to revive and reconsider the alien wonder that's long lingered in his mind, from E.T. to War of the Worlds. Disclosure Day, Spielberg's first summer movie in a decade, is already being hailed as one of his best in years. But this time, Spielberg is testing whether he can conjure some of his tardemark movie magic less with imagination than with conviction.

I've been a believer since I made Close Encounters 50 years ago, Spielberg says. But I would always say: Until I've seen a UAP or a UFO with my own eyes, I'm not going to categorically state that life from out there has come here. But I've changed that, he adds. I'm now willing to change my mind because of the circumstantial evidence which is overwhelming.

What auditors flagged in the May filing?

Disclosure Day stars Josh O'Connor as a cybersecurity whistleblower with government evidence, long suppressed, chronicling a history of alien encounters. guiding him in his escape from a corporate executive (Colin Firth) trying to keep it all under wraps is the disclosure movement's leader (Colman Domingo).

Meanwhile,a meteorologist named Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) begins having a mysterious epiphany. When he first began thinking about the movie, Spielberg called up the screenwriter David Koepp, a longtime collaborator who wrote Jurassic Park and War of the Worlds. I said, Sure, what's it about, recalls Koepp. And he said, Oh, you know, aliens again.

A familiar pattern from the 2019 crash

Spielberg was coming off an unusually long break by his breakneck standards. His 2022 film The Fabelmans pulled from his own childhood, dramatizing his parents' painful divorce and his own origins as a filmmaker. Spielberg's first gut-wrenchingly autobiographical movie left him unsure of what was next.

It was the hardest question I ever had to ask myself because there was such completion in resolving so many personal issues that I had never aired in public before The Fabelmans, Spielberg says. I didn't care whether people thought The Fabelmans was just a tale, a yarn, or if they cared that it was all true. I didn't care about that. It was something I did for myself.

Broader context: The 2023 House Subcommittee on National Security hearing

Spielberg, having long followed reports of alleged alien encounters, was inspired by the 2023 House Subcommittee on National Security hearing on UAPs: Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena. Among the witnesses was whistleblower and former Air Force intelligence officer David Grusch, who testified that the government concealed a program investigating UAPs.

The Pentagon then denied it. Yet in April, President Donald Trump said the Pentagon is preparing to release some very interesting UFO files. Those 2023 testimonies and others so fueled Spielberg that he produced a 50-page treatment on what would become Disclosure Day.

Open questions: Who is the unnamed buyer?

During the writing process with Koepp, he texted him more notes, he says, than I've ever sent to anyone in my life. There was a period in there where I believe he re-read the script every single day for a year, Koepp says. We'd be in different time zones and I would wake up to 30 or 35 texts from his most current reading of the script.