For the first time in almost 25 years, Steven Spielberg is one of the people behind an upcoming sci-fi movie that is wholly original, thanks to his new movie Disclosure Day. However, that doesn’t mean you won’t find some connections between the new film and his legendary contributions to the genre. And when CinemaBlend spoke to Disclosure Day’s screenwriter David Koepp, he name-dropped one beloved film of Spielberg's that is linked to the new movie.
Koepp and Spielberg are longtime collaborators who’ve worked together before on Jurassic Park, War of the Worlds and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Since I’d heard him call Disclosure Day a "spiritual sequel” to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, I had to know what he meant by that. In Koepp’s words:
It's clearly not a sequel to Close Encounters. None of the characters recur and the events of that film don't affect the events of this film. But it's fair to think of it as a bookend to Close Encounters. The thoughts that Steven was having in the seventies, and that he'd had growing up that led to that film are similar to the thoughts that are expressed in this film, but different. In the '70s, Close Encounters came out of a cultural milieu of paranoia. We were starting to think, ‘Do you think maybe our government is lying to us?’ We'd been through Watergate and the Vietnam War, and so there was a certain innocence that had gone away and was replaced by a cynicism.
Close Encounters was released back in 1977 and served as the filmmaker’s first of a handful of alien movies he made, even predating E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. As Koepp shared in our interview, there are no characters or plotlines that connect it to Disclosure Day, but they very much could be thought of in the same breath due to their themes. As he continued:
Then you cut to 50 years later, and we know, we know the government is lying to us. We know so many people are lying to us. So much of what we see and hear is lies and fake. And so, what this movie does is it accepts that, ‘Okay, yeah, it's all lies. We know it's all lies. Now what's the truth and could we please have it?’ And so it really prioritizes ‘Can we please have the truth? We have a right to know.’ So, I like that it's similar subject matter filtered through 50 years of growth and experience as a culture and Steven as a person.
While it’s somehow been almost a half of a century between Steven Spielberg’s first alien movie and Disclosure Day, Koepp thinks they both speak to how the public has perceived the potential of extraterrestrial life in association with the government’s knowledge about it. While Close Encounters explored the wonder and excitement involved in someone finding out about the existence of alien life, Disclosure Day starts with the idea of alien life being a truth already within the world, it just has yet to be officially released to the public.
Disclosure Day came out of an original story Spielberg thought up and started coming up with a concept for. He ended up writing a 38-page email detailing his plans for the storyline to David Koepp, which he then asked the screenwriter to work with him on. Koepp told us he thought to himself, “Holy smokes!” while reading the idea for the first time and thought it “worked so well.”
So far, Disclosure Day is receiving a lot of positive reactions that have called it a “towering home run,” “truly something special,” and “just great.” It has a fantastic Rotten Tomatoes score of 87% after a slew of complementary reviews went online. The science fiction movie is the biggest of the 2026 movie releases to come to theaters this weekend. You can see it for yourself on June 12.
