At a time when the box office is being defined by a new generation of storytellers, one of its most hallowed is coming back for another round. For only the second time in the last decade and a half, Steven Spielberg is on the summer movie slate with his original sci-fi thriller, “Disclosure Day.”
Loaded with a cast that includes Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor, Colman Domingo and Colin Firth, “Disclosure Day” — which is based on an original story by Spielberg — follows two people who, thanks to a mysterious event in their childhood, are the key to unlocking a truth that has been covered up for decades: there are aliens amongst us, and they have been hidden by a powerful secret organization that has been exploiting their technology for themselves.
While critics are divided on whether this film lands somewhere in the middle or in the upper echelons of his filmography, their reviews of “Disclosure Day” have been overwhelmingly positive as it stands with a 90% Rotten Tomatoes score. That might move the needle in presales and tracking over the next couple of days, but for now projections stand at $35-40 million, which means audience word-of-mouth will be vital.
With 39 feature films under his belt as a director — not counting the dozens more he’s produced through Amblin Entertainment like Chloe Zhao’s “Hamnet” — and three Oscars from 24 nominations, the 79-year-old Spielberg has nothing left to prove.
He has three movies — “Jaws,” “E.T.,” and “Jurassic Park” — that became the highest grossing film in box office history at the time of their release. To date, Spielberg has $10.7 billion in combined global box office grosses, a total only rivaled by the $10.5 billion of James Cameron, which sets him as the highest-grossing director in cinema history.
But with all of his success, it is easy to forget that Spielberg has not been the box office titan he once was. Since his 2011 film “The Adventures of Tintin,” only two of Spielberg’s films have grossed more than $100 million at the domestic box office: his 2012 biopic “Lincoln” with $182 million and his 2018 adaptation of the nostalgia-fueled sci-fi novel “Ready Player One” with $137 million.
And while Spielberg contributed to the summer box office in the 2000s with movies like “Minority Report” ($132M domestic/$358M worldwide), “War of the Worlds” ($234M dom./$603M WW) and “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” ($317M dom./$786M WW), Spielberg only released one summer movie in the 2010s: Disney’s Roald Dahl adaptation “The BFG,” which made just $55.8 million domestic and $194 million worldwide.
Spielberg’s focus in his golden years has largely been on more mature fare, including historical dramas like “War Horse,” “Bridge of Spies” and “The Post,” all of which have earned him critical praise but served more as supplements to the fall/winter awards box office season rather than money-making high-points.
And in the 2020s, Spielberg’s box office presence has been nonexistent even as his work brings in industry plaudits. His 2021 adaptation of “West Side Story” was sidelined by a COVID-19 variant surge that kept Spielberg’s core audience at home, causing it to bomb with just $76 million worldwide.
Then came his far cheaper 2022 autobiographical drama “The Fabelmans,” which earned him another pair of Oscar nominations but made even less with just $45.6 million worldwide, including just $17.3 million from a domestic run that never exceeded 2,000 screens.
So it’s been a while since Spielberg has put forth a film not trying to appeal to discerning cineastes or nostalgic movie nerds, but to a wide audience. And unlike “Ready Player One,” “Tintin,” or “Crystal Skull,” “Disclosure Day” is being sold in a far more old-fashioned way: with cryptic marketing that teases its alien premise while staying light on plot details and focusing more on the film’s gripping car and train action sequences.
With a reported $115 million production budget and marketing spend of around $80 million, a $50 million domestic opening would put “Disclosure Day” on firm ground as the theatrical market heads into the peak of the summer season. Even if it falls short of that, anything higher than $41 million would pass “Ready Player One” as Spielberg’s highest opening since “Crystal Skull.”
But it will be the audience metrics, not the dollar figure, that will provide a better sense of whether “Disclosure Day” will be a theatrical success for Universal. At Spielberg’s behest, Universal has kept footage from the film’s third act out of the marketing material for the film, as he explained at CinemaCon that moviegoers have become smart at recognizing footage from trailers and can get a sense as they watch a film of where a movie is going.
That may put the audience even more firmly under Spielberg’s movie magic, but the risk of a cryptic marketing campaign is that audiences end up passing on it because they either have no idea what it is, or word-of-mouth falters because a significant chunk of the opening weekend audience gets the wrong impression from the trailers and gives it a thumbs down for not meeting those expectations.
While the aliens Spielberg teases do eventually come, will the masses embrace the human conflict of “Disclosure Day,” where car chases and fierce manhunts are fueled by clashing views on humanity and society’s ability to handle world-altering truths? Will moviegoers be riveted or lost by David Koepp’s sprawling, concept-heavy screenplay all in service of an earnest appeal to empathy?
And at a time when Gen Z has firmly rejected a new “Star Wars” film and a “Masters of the Universe” revival, Spielberg can’t assume a generation that did not grow up seeing “Jurassic Park” and “Indiana Jones” in theaters will faithfully show up.
Spielberg, for his part, has more aggressively promoted this film than many of his recent works, making the podcast rounds, appearing on Bill Simmons’ “Rewatchables” and even doing an event with TikTok personality and filmmaker Reece Feldman to drum up hype with younger moviegoers.
Spielberg’s longtime fans, many of whom are north of 45, will reliably show up even if it’s not on opening weekend. But for Spielberg to reclaim some of his theatrical drawing power, it will come down to whether “Disclosure Day,” an old-fashioned take on alien sci-fi with a modern, action-packed twist, is embraced by the audience that has made “Backrooms” a smash hit.
