The film that turned UFOs from B-movie kitsch into something cinematic, spiritual, and genre-defining. Following the success of Jaws, Spielberg used his enormous new commercial leverage to greenlight a hugely expensive, deeply personal project about ordinary Americans drawn — by visions, by inexplicable obsessions, by something that may or may not be a divine summons — to a remote location in Wyoming, where the United States government is preparing to receive humanity’s first official extraterrestrial guests.
The film follows Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss), an Indiana power-line repairman whose late-night encounter with a passing UFO leaves him compulsively sculpting and drawing the same mountainous shape — at one point destroying his family’s living room to recreate it in mud and chicken wire. Jillian Guiler (Melinda Dillon) is the single mother whose four-year-old son Barry is taken from their home by an unseen force in the film’s most genuinely terrifying sequence. François Truffaut, in his only English-language role, plays the French scientist coordinating the global mission to make sense of the visitations. Spielberg cast Truffaut partly as homage to the French New Wave, partly because he wanted someone whose own face would communicate genuine wonder on camera.
Spielberg’s central decision — to treat alien arrival as a quasi-religious experience rather than a threat — broke with the entire previous tradition of UFO cinema. The film’s defining sequences are not invasions or panicked evacuations but moments of awe: the five-tone musical greeting, the Devils Tower mothership descent, the gentle wide-eyed beings emerging at the end. John Williams’s score — particularly the iconic five-note motif used as humanity’s first attempt at communication — is among his most influential work. Vilmos Zsigmond’s cinematography won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography. The film was nominated for seven other Oscars and grossed $306 million on a $20 million budget.
Its influence on every subsequent UFO film is total. Contact, Arrival, The Vast of Night, and dozens of others are all in direct conversation with Close Encounters’ central thesis: that meeting them might be wonderful. Even the films that disagree — Signs, The Thing, Independence Day — define themselves against Spielberg’s vision.
And now, almost half a century later, Spielberg himself is returning to the conversation. Disclosure Day is not a sequel — Spielberg has explicitly denied that — but it is a continuation. Emily Blunt’s Margaret Fairchild, possessed by an alien language during a live broadcast, is unmistakably descended from Roy Neary’s compulsive Devils Tower visions. Some encounters, Close Encounters argued, change the people who experience them permanently. Disclosure Day appears to be asking what happens when those people then have to convince the rest of humanity that what they experienced was real.
Director: Steven Spielberg. Stars: Richard Dreyfuss, François Truffaut, Teri Garr, Melinda Dillon, Bob Balaban, Cary Guffey.
Disclosure Day (2026): Everything We Know About Spielberg’s New UFO Movie
Steven Spielberg, working from his own original story — his first writing credit since A.I. Artificial Intelligence in 2001 — with screenplay by frequent collaborator David Koepp (Jurassic Park, War of the Worlds, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull).
Emily Blunt as Margaret Fairchild, a Kansas City meteorologist and former journalist whose live on-air broadcast is interrupted by an unknown alien language she cannot consciously control. Josh O’Connor as Daniel Kellner, a young government cybersecurity expert who has stolen classified files about extraterrestrial life and is now on the run from his former employers. Colin Firth as Noah Scanlon, the head of Wardex, a private corporation hired by various world governments to manage the secret. Eve Hewson as Jane Blankenship. Colman Domingo as Hugo Wakefield, a Wardex defector who advocates for full public disclosure and may be the film’s moral centre. Wyatt Russell, Henry Lloyd-Hughes, Chavo Guerrero Jr. and Elizabeth Marvel round out the supporting cast.
Universal’s official synopsis is deliberately spare. “If you found out we weren’t alone, if someone showed you, proved it to you, would that frighten you?” Trailers and behind-the-scenes reporting suggest the film centres on three converging narratives: Margaret’s transformation from local TV personality into unwitting public face of an inexplicable phenomenon; Daniel’s increasingly desperate attempts to leak what he knows before Wardex can silence him; and a shadowy decades-long government effort, possibly tracing back to the 1947 Roswell incident, that is now reaching its endgame. Reports indicate that both Margaret and Daniel may have been abducted as children, and that their convergence in adulthood is the actual event the film is built around.
Spielberg has reunited with cinematographer Janusz Kamiński (his collaborator on every film since Schindler’s List in 1993) and is shooting on 35mm, IMAX-formatted for the largest possible theatrical experience. Production design draws openly from 1970s paranoid thrillers — Three Days of the Condor, The Conversation, All the President’s Men — rather than from the cleaner aesthetic of his own Close Encounters. David Koepp has said in interviews with Empire that “this felt like Three Days of the Condor to me. Conspiracies are fantastic for movies because they’re an onion, and you peel away layers and find out more and more.”
Disclosure Day marks Williams’s 30th collaboration with Spielberg, and reportedly his last. The composer, now 94, has said this is among his proudest scores. A leaked piece of music from the trailer suggests the score returns to the textural, choral writing of Close Encounters rather than the simpler melodic register of E.T.
Why it matters: Disclosure Day is not a sequel to Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Spielberg has explicitly said so. But it is, by his own admission, a return to the questions he was asking nearly half a century ago — questions he has spent the intervening decades approaching from various angles in E.T., War of the Worlds, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. “I have seven solid decades of a vast personal interest in what lies beyond our atmosphere, in the cosmos, and what is within our atmosphere right here on planet Earth,” Spielberg told Empire. “If I could know, I would want to know. Who would not want to know?”
It is also, possibly, his last sci-fi film. Spielberg has spoken publicly about the relative finiteness of his remaining career and the projects he still wants to make. Disclosure Day was, by his own account, the one he wanted to make most.
Where to watch Disclosure Day and the films on this list
Disclosure Day arrives in cinemas worldwide on June 12, 2026 — including IMAX, premium-large-format, Dolby Cinema, and 70mm presentations at major chains. Many of the 30 films above are already screening in classic-cinema repertory programmes throughout 2026 in the lead-up to the release; the BFI in London has announced a dedicated retrospective programme, and AMC, Cinemark, and Regal in the United States are running rotating Spielberg double-bills throughout May and June.
Find showtimes near you on CGOTickets and book your seat for opening weekend. We’re tracking advance ticket availability for Disclosure Day across major chains as it opens.
And if you want to catch up on the canon Spielberg himself helped build, the obvious starting points are Close Encounters of the Third Kind, then E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, then Arrival — three films that together cover everything Disclosure Day appears to be reaching for: wonder, fear, and the deep human need to understand what’s out there. From there, fan out into the genre’s wider corners: Contact for philosophical seriousness, The Thing for paranoia, District 9 for political ambition, The Vast of Night for atmosphere, Aliens for spectacle. By June 12, you’ll know exactly what canon Spielberg’s new film is in conversation with.