‘Disclosure Day’ Is Not Based on a True Story or a Book and That Is Exactly What Makes It Special

With blockbuster season in full swing, few names carry more weight in a theater lobby than Steven Spielberg. His latest film, ‘Disclosure Day’, arrives in theaters on June 12, 2026, distributed by Universal Pictures, and curiosity around it has reached a peak. Among the most searched questions swirling around the project is whether the story comes from a pre-existing source, whether a book, a TV series, or some other adaptation pipeline. The answer is a clean and resounding no.

‘Disclosure Day’ is not based on a book, a TV show, or any other pre-existing source. It is a narrative that Spielberg himself conceived, later shaped into a screenplay by writer David Koepp. In an era where studios lean almost exclusively on established IP, that origin story alone makes this one worth paying attention to.

Spielberg, speaking with Craig Melvin alongside stars Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor, and Colman Domingo in an interview on TODAY, shared that the idea came with a genuinely ripped-from-the-headlines spark. He revealed he came up with the concept after videos surfaced of unidentified flying objects, and that a Congressional hearing on UFOs held in May 2022 “changed everything” for him. “It wasn’t just sensationalized,” he said. “This was something being taken very seriously by the major news media.”

Spielberg was also specifically inspired by a 2017 New York Times article titled “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program”, which he described as having rekindled his interest in the subject. After receiving Spielberg’s initial treatment via email, screenwriter David Koepp would go on to develop 42 drafts for the screenplay, the most of his entire career.

Koepp described the film’s tonal DNA as something distinct from Spielberg’s classic alien work, noting that it has elements of a ’70s conspiracy thriller. “Conspiracies are fantastic for movies because they’re an onion, and you peel away layers and find out more and more,” he told NBC. The story centers on a cybersecurity expert, played by O’Connor, who steals secrets about non-human life and becomes a whistleblower, while meteorologist Margaret Fairchild, played by Blunt, begins experiencing strange phenomena and finds herself psychically linked to him.

In a featurette released ahead of the film’s opening, Blunt made the original nature of the project explicit. “This film is such an original science fiction story about the idea of non-human life existing on other worlds. That we are not alone,” she said. Blunt also described Spielberg as her “movie dad” in a November episode of Entertainment Weekly’s ‘The Awardist’ podcast, saying, “Steven makes me cry when I talk about him because he has become like my movie dad, and it’s been the privilege of privileges working with him.”

By the time ‘Disclosure Day’ opens in theaters, it will have been 21 years since Spielberg last directed an alien film, that being the Tom Cruise-starring adaptation of ‘War of the Worlds.’ In an Empire interview, Blunt explained that the movie “answers questions posed” by ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’, and Spielberg himself has said the question of whether humanity is alone “has not only haunted me, but it has inspired me” and has “now resolved itself to my satisfaction in Disclosure Day.”

For a filmmaker of his stature to return to the genre with something completely his own after more than two decades is genuinely rare, and the question now is whether this feels like a companion piece to his earlier alien classics or something that stands entirely apart. Feel free to share your take in the comments on which Spielberg sci-fi film you think ‘Disclosure Day’ will most resemble once audiences finally get to see it.