Father Dan Reehil, a Roman Catholic priest and exorcist with the Diocese of Nashville, has called Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day potentially “demonically cursed,” becoming the highest-profile religious-side voice to publicly question the alien-disclosure film’s content since the project opened to a $94 million worldwide debut last weekend. Reehil’s comments, posted to his personal X account and amplified across Christian-press outlets through the week, frame the film as potentially carrying “demons attached to the movie.”
Reehil, who has served the Diocese of Nashville’s exorcist office since 2019 and is one of fewer than 100 ordained Catholic exorcists working in the United States, framed his comments around what he described as the film’s depiction of contact-event narratives that the Roman Catholic Church’s traditional teaching has been historically wary of folding into popular entertainment. He suggested in his X post that the studio’s marketing momentum could be “demonically cursed to shake faith” and that the broader audience response should be considered through a discernment-and-prayer framework.
The Christian Post, which ran the comments Friday morning, reported Reehil’s framing has drawn sharp pushback inside the broader Catholic-press ecosystem itself, with America Media and the National Catholic Reporter publishing follow-up explainers that characterize the priest’s language as speculative rather than dispositive. Several Catholic-press writers have separately compared Reehil’s framing to the late-1980s Satanic-Panic-and-heavy-metal cycle that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops formally distanced itself from in 1992.
Spielberg himself has not responded to Reehil’s specific comments. The director’s broader Disclosure Day press cycle has been built around the Happy Sad Confused podcast moment where he revealed Harrison Ford’s Jurassic Park rejection, which we covered in our earlier dispatch, and Spielberg has otherwise stayed on the film’s commercial-promotion register through the week. Universal Pictures, the film’s distributor, declined to comment to The Christian Post.
Disclosure Day opened June 5 to $94 million worldwide and has held strong into its second weekend, with The Mandalorian and Grogu pulling a $33 million Friday and Obsession beating its own opening per our box-office dispatch. The film’s commercial success has, by industry-tracker framing, made the religious-side pushback both higher-profile and easier for the studio to dismiss without formal engagement. Reehil’s X post had drawn roughly 280,000 impressions by Saturday morning, putting it in the top 1 percent of his account’s engagement record.
The pushback dynamic itself is not new for Spielberg, whose 1982 E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial drew similar religious-side commentary from a smaller bench of priests and pastors at the time, including a notable Pat Robertson 700 Club segment. The director’s broader extraterrestrial-and-contact-narrative filmography, from Close Encounters of the Third Kind through A.I. Artificial Intelligence, has drawn similar but lower-profile faith-side commentary across decades. Disclosure Day, by virtue of its specific UFO-history press cycle, has drawn more concentrated religious response than any Spielberg film since.
The Diocese of Nashville has not issued formal commentary on Reehil’s statements. The Catholic-press ecosystem, including First Things, the Catholic Herald, and the National Catholic Register, has been split between writers who frame Reehil’s comments as legitimate discernment and writers who frame them as overreach. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops Office of Film and Broadcasting has not yet posted its own formal review of Disclosure Day; that office’s reviews historically take roughly two weeks after a wide release to land.
Disclosure Day remains in theaters worldwide. Spielberg is in pre-production on his Universal Pictures UFO-history follow-up, currently dated for late 2027, and his next theatrical credit beyond that is the previously-announced Joan of Arc reimagining for Warner Bros., set for Christmas 2027. Reehil has been the Nashville Diocese’s most-public exorcist voice since 2019 and has previously made public commentary on the Harry Potter franchise, the 2014 Russell Crowe Noah, and the 2022 Hereditary horror cycle.
