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The posters promised that the truth would belong to seven billion people. In June, rather fewer of them bought a ticket. Steven Spielberg’s UFO thriller Disclosure Day opened in cinemas and IMAX on 12 June and ended its run on about $250 million worldwide, according to Collider. Space.com puts it nearer $241 million. Either way, that was not enough to celebrate on a reported production budget of $115 million, and Space.com estimates the total cost at roughly $200 million once marketing is included. For a Spielberg film about aliens, it was an underwhelming result.
Five months on, the aliens appear to have found a better landing site: the sofa. Collider reported on 7 November that Disclosure Day has now spent more than 100 days in Amazon’s US charts. Collider doesn’t name the chart or its data source, so treat the exact claim with a little X-Files scepticism. The broad picture does hang together, though. The film is available to buy and rent through Amazon, and since 9 October it has been streaming exclusively on Peacock in the US. Plenty of people who skipped it in June are clearly catching up with it now, at home and without paying for IMAX popcorn.
Emily Blunt and Josh O’Connor lead a cast that includes Colman Domingo, Colin Firth, Eve Hewson and Wyatt Russell. Spielberg came up with the story and David Koepp wrote the screenplay. Space.com describes the plot as a Kansas City meteorologist and a tech whistleblower on the run from a shadowy group determined to hide the evidence that aliens are living among us. The reviews were mixed, ranging from admiration for the craft to complaints that the story itself was surprisingly thin. Our own coverage at the time included the final trailer and Mark Kermode’s review.
Science fiction has a long tradition of films that disappoint in cinemas and are rediscovered later. John Carpenter’s The Thing was savaged in 1982 and is now regarded as one of the best horror films ever made. Blade Runner came out the same summer, did poorly at the box office, and needed home video and several recuts before it became holy writ. Nobody is suggesting Disclosure Day belongs in that company yet. A hundred days in a sales chart is not a cult, it is a long queue. But Spielberg has been looking at the sky since Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977, and he has always been good at films that people come back to.
There is a fitting irony in all this. The film is about a world being told a secret that had been kept from it, and audiences only found it once it was quietly sitting in their streaming menus. Here at SFcrowsnest, whose regular UFO/UAP round-ups have tracked the real-world disclosure debate for years, we can confirm that the truth is indeed out there. It just turns out to be on Peacock.
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