LOS ANGELES — One night before his new film opened in theaters, Steven Spielberg held a special screening for his friends. Tom Cruise showed up with a custom popcorn bucket shaped like Spielberg’s head, wearing a plastic “Disclosure Day” cap. Colin Farrell was there. So was Dakota Fanning. The three of them had all made films with Spielberg before — Cruise in War of the Worlds, Farrell in Minority Report, Fanning in War of the Worlds — and on Thursday night they sat together in a theater in Los Angeles to watch the director do it again.
Cruise posted afterward on social media: “Nothing better than a summer Spielberg movie night in a packed theater with friends.”
Disclosure Day opens nationwide Friday, June 13, 2026. The film stars Emily Blunt as a TV meteorologist with an unexplained connection to extraterrestrial visitors and Josh O’Connor as a cybersecurity expert who has discovered proof that contact has already been made. Colin Firth plays the government bureaucrat determined to ensure the public never finds out. Eve Hewson, Colman Domingo, and Wyatt Russell also appear. The script was written by David Koepp, who wrote Jurassic Park for Spielberg more than thirty years ago. John Williams scored it. Variety reported the film earned $6.5 million in Thursday preview screenings.
Tracking projects the film will open to approximately $35 million this weekend, a strong number for an original property — no franchise, no prior IP, no sequel backstory required. Spielberg made the case for that kind of film explicitly at CinemaCon in April, telling the assembled exhibition industry that Hollywood needed to invest in original movies. Disclosure Day, a Universal and Amblin Entertainment production, is the argument made in practice.
Spielberg returns to the alien-encounter genre that has defined several of the most important films in his career. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) established the template: government secrecy, civilian discovery, a child or ordinary person at the center of first contact. War of the Worlds (2005) turned that template darker, positioning the alien arrival as catastrophe rather than wonder. Disclosure Day appears to navigate somewhere between the two — a thriller built around what happens when the proof finally surfaces.
The reunion at Thursday’s screening carried its own weight. Cruise, Farrell, and Fanning made their respective Spielberg films at different points in his career, across a four-year span in the early 2000s. That three of them turned out — voluntarily and with obvious affection — for the premiere of a new original film in 2026 says something about the professional relationships Spielberg builds and keeps. Variety covered the screening and the attendees.
For Cruise, the evening is a pause in a year of active production. He spent most of 2025 finishing the latest Mission: Impossible installment. His next theatrical release after that is Digger, a satirical comedy directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, arriving this fall. It will be his first non-franchise film since American Made in 2017 — a long time away from the kind of original, director-driven work that Disclosure Day represents and that Spielberg was advocating for at CinemaCon.
The popcorn bucket, for the record, was not part of the official Disclosure Day merchandise. The film’s actual promotional collectible is a 16-inch stag with a cardinal perched on its antlers. Cruise’s version was custom. Spielberg’s reaction to seeing his own head molded in food-grade plastic was not reported.
