The summer movie season is in full swing, meaning highly anticipated titles like Toy Story 5, The Odyssey, and Spider-Man: Brand New Day are right around the corner. But before any of those hit theaters, audiences will be treated to something that’s just as exciting: Disclosure Day, the new science fiction film from Steven Spielberg. With the film set to arrive in mid-June, Universal has commenced its final marketing blitz in an effort to raise awareness and generate buzz for the project. The Disclosure Day trailers have leaned heavily into the sense of mystery, and that remains the case with the final preview.
Today, Universal unveiled the last Disclosure Day trailer to announce tickets are now on sale. Rather than being a traditional trailer that consists only of footage from the film, this new look at Disclosure Day operates a bit as a behind-the-scenes featurette, as segments of Spielberg discussing how his perspective on alien life has changed in the decades since he made Close Encounters of the Third Kind are peppered throughout. Check out the trailer in the space below:
Spielberg mentioning Close Encounters by name is sure to catch the attention of sci-fi fans. One of the most popular theories about the legendary director’s next film is that it’s actually a secret follow-up to that seminal sci-fi classic. The notion that Close Encounters and Disclosure Day are connected isn’t entirely far-fetched. Both movies deal with humanity coming into contact with alien life and have government conspiracies at the center of their stories. Disclosure Day‘s narrative seems to be of a much larger scale; Close Encounters primarily kept things focused on Roy Neary, but it’s easy to see how people could think Disclosure Day is a Close Encounters sequel.
It’s fun to speculate about, but fans shouldn’t go into Disclosure Day expecting an actual Close Encounters follow-up … at least in the traditional sense of movie sequels (for starters, the two films are distributed by different studios). However, Disclosure Day seems like it’ll be very much a spiritual sequel to the 1977 sci-fi classic. A month ago, star Emily Blunt teased that Disclosure Day answers “questions posed by Close Encounters“ — not with regard to specific narrative beats but overarching thematic concepts. Spielberg was obviously a much younger man when he made Close Encounters. With decades of experience under his belt, he has a fresh perspective on those ideas.
It’ll be fascinating to see what Spielberg has in store. Like many of his best works, Disclosure Day seems to capture the classic Spielbergian sense of awe and wonder, but it also looks to be mixing in a bit of the paranoia and unease that defined the director’s post-9/11 films. The catalyst for the plot is a whistleblower figure stealing information from a government agency to tell the public the truth, and there’s a debate about whether or not the population of Earth will be able to handle what they learn. At the same time, Spielberg mentions in the final trailer that he believes full disclosure would be good for us, reminding people of their “capacity for empathy.” This suggests Disclosure Day will have a hopeful message of people coming together during something extraordinary.
In a way, Disclosure Day could be to Spielberg and sci-fi what The Irishman was to Martin Scorsese and gangster films. Like Disclosure Day, The Irishman saw a master filmmaker return to a genre he’s synonymous with and tackle a familiar story with a different approach. The Irishman is something Scorsese only could have made in his later years, drawing from his years of experiences to inform the film’s perspective. It felt like Scorsese was making a definitive statement about his time with mob movies. Based on what we know about Disclosure Day, this is something only an elderly Spielberg could have made. Whether Disclosure Day is as deconstructive as The Irishman remains to be seen, but this could be Spielberg’s own definitive statement on alien life.
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