Disclosure Day: Spielberg returns to science fiction in 2026

Forty-four years after E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Steven Spielberg has returned to the territory that made him a legend: first contact between humanity and something that shouldn't exist. Disclosure Day opens tomorrow, 12 June, and the first reactions out of the United Kingdom — where the film opened yesterday — point to something rare: the best Spielberg in two decades.

Spielberg and aliens — fifty years of obsession

Spielberg's relationship with the subject predates Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). He grew up on 1950s science fiction and always saw the alien not as a threat but as a mirror — something that reveals more about us than about them. E.T. (1982) was the fullest expression of that view: the vulnerable alien, the boy who protects him, the state that hunts them both.

War of the Worlds (2005) was different — pure terror, relentless invasion, Tom Cruise running the entire time. There's no communication, no contact: only flight. That's the Spielberg traumatised by the aftermath of 9/11, not the Spielberg of wonder.

Disclosure Day looks like a return to the second position — but with 44 more years of experience and a screenplay by David Koepp, who already worked with him on The Lost World.

What Disclosure Day is

Janet Morales (Emily Blunt) is a meteorologist at a TV station in Kansas City. During a live broadcast, something takes hold of her — a force of unexplained origin — and she begins transmitting a message that isn't hers. On the same day, Connor Webb (Josh O'Connor), an activist campaigning for disclosure of the truth about extraterrestrial life, realises that what he's been preaching for years may actually be happening.

The premise is simple and works precisely because of that: it doesn't open with ships or explosions. It opens with an ordinary woman, live on television, being used as a channel. The discomfort is immediate because it's intimate.

The government cover-up isn't background scenery — it's the engine of the plot. The film follows a whistleblower (Colman Domingo) trying to stop the evidence being buried before the world sees it. Colin Firth and Eve Hewson round out the main cast, in roles the studio deliberately kept opaque in the marketing — a sign they're betting on the surprise of that first screening.

Emily Blunt and the weight of carrying the film

The first reactions published by Variety called Blunt's performance "all-time" — the kind of hyperbolic assessment that only sticks when it's true. She has already proved in Sicario, in A Quiet Place and in Oppenheimer that she can carry heavy emotional weight without forcing it. Here the complexity is different: this is a woman who loses control of her own body and has to reclaim the narrative of who she is.

Josh O'Connor, revealed in La Chimera (2023) and an increasingly central presence in European and American prestige cinema, brings the character a mixture of justified fanaticism and naivety that avoids the "conspiracy nutcase" cliché.

2026 and the wave of serious sci-fi that won't stop

We're in a moment of rediscovery for science fiction that bets on characters. Project Hail Mary arrived in March with Ryan Gosling and became a $655 million phenomenon on word of mouth. Dune: Part Three closed out Villeneuve's trilogy with a sense of monumentality you rarely see. Now Spielberg steps in carrying the weight of legend.

What these films have in common: they bet on characters before they bet on spectacle. Generative AI destroyed the cinema of empty effects — when anyone can generate a photorealistic image of a ship exploding, the special effect loses the power to impress on its own. What impresses now is what always impressed: a performance you can't look away from.

82% on Rotten Tomatoes across 180 reviews after the openings in Paris (2 June) and the UK (10 June) is consistency that's hard to fake.

Is it worth seeing on opening weekend?

Yes, and there's a strategic reason beyond the pleasure: films like this depend on opening-weekend box office to secure weeks on screen. Project Hail Mary only became a phenomenon because word of mouth exploded in the first few days.

If you like science fiction that anchors the impossible in genuinely human characters — as Metropolis did in 1927, almost 100 years ago — Disclosure Day is exactly what you were waiting for without knowing it. Spielberg still knows what he's doing.

Are you going on opening weekend? Got a favourite cinema for the big releases? Tell us in the comments.