Nearly 50 years after he helped invent the blockbuster with Jaws, Steven Spielberg is returning to spectacle filmmaking this weekend with Disclosure Day. The question now is if audiences will turn up in droves for the original concept he conceived of before handing script duties off to Jurassic Park scribe David Koepp.
His UFO feature is off to a $6.5 million start from Thursday previews and is targeting around $35 million domestically for the feature that as made for a net $115 million budget.
The film has an ensemble including Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor, Colin Firth, Coleman Domingo and Eve Hewson — but the Spielberg name is the big draw. Over the past decade, Spielberg has dabbled in dramas for adults (The Post, The Fabelmans) — and made the musical West Side Story — but has not helmed a pure popcorn flick since 2018’s Ready Player One grossed $607 million globally.
He pioneered the UFO genre with the seminal 1977 feature Close Encounters of the Third Kind and returend for the 2005 Tom Cruise starrer War of the Worlds.
The feature has strong reviews, with critics giving it an 82 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and The Hollywood Reporter‘s chief film critic David Rooney writing, “There are allegories that can be read about fear of the unknown breeding cruelty and exploitation, but Disclosure Day is first and foremost a propulsive yarn with thematic roots in hope, truth, empathy and perhaps even spirituality.”
Universal is opening the film, from Spielberg’s Amblin, in 3,824 theaters.
