April 15, 2026, 10:32 p.m. ET
LAS VEGAS – Director Steven Spielberg confirmed that aliens are the subject of his upcoming film “Disclosure Day” and debuted new footage during the Universal Studios presentation at CinemaCon in Las Vegas on April 15.
“I’ve been curious ever since I was a little kid about what’s happening in the night sky,” he told the audience, saying that the possibility of extraterrestrial life sparks his creativity.
Spielberg’s return to the summer blockbuster appears to follow Josh O’Connor‘s character, Daniel Kelner, fighting to reveal the existence of extra-terrestrial life along with Emily Blunt and Colman Domingo. Connor and Blunt appear to play characters that are possessed by aliens. Colin Firth appears to lead a shadowy government entity tasked with keeping the existence of aliens secret.
The “Jaws” filmmaker said the film was “way closer to truth than to fiction.”
He pointed to a 2017 New York Times report on the existence of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program for the return to the subject he’s explored in “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” saying that it made him curious again.
“I truly believe that this movie is going to answer questions and cause you to ask a lot of questions,” Spielberg said.
The multi-Oscar award winner said that he has been highly protective of the film’s third act due to younger audiences using marketing materials to anticipate plot points in upcoming films.
“All you need to get from the beginning to the end is a seatbelt,” he said.
Domingo, who introduced and interviewed Spielberg, announced that film titan won the Motion Picture Association’s’ America 250 award.
“Steven Spielberg defines what Americans think when they think of movies,” MPA Chairman Charles Rivkin said when he presented the award.
In his acceptance speech, the Oscar-winner recounted the story of him falling in love with film and showing movies for charity in his childhood home in Phoenix and making money by “charging 12-cents for popcorn.”
“Nothing could compete with sitting in the first three rows of a movie palace (and) watching a Cecil B. DeMille epic with color by Technicolor,” Spielberg said.
He called for studios to expand the exclusive theater window for films and rely less on already produced intellectual property. “If all we make is known branded IP we’re going to run out of gas and we’re going to run out of gas very quickly,” he added.