Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day, the Emily Blunt-led alien-encounter thriller in which a Kansas City weather reporter intercepts the signal that pulls humanity into first contact, opened to $44 million domestic and $93 million worldwide over the June 12-14 weekend, per Deadline, Variety and The Hollywood Reporter. The number landed roughly $5 million above the soft tracking projections that had Universal Pictures bracing for a sub-$40 million launch as recently as Wednesday.
It is the strongest opening of Spielberg’s career since Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull opened to $100 million in May 2008 — a stretch that includes his three theatrical releases since (The BFG, Ready Player One, The Fabelmans) all opening below $20 million. The New York Times headlined its weekend recap “Disclosure Day Ends Spielberg’s Summer Box-Office Drought,” a phrase Universal’s distribution chief Jim Orr is understood to have circulated internally as “the only sentence anyone needs to read today.”
The international split was $49 million from 73 markets, with the United Kingdom ($7.8M), Mexico ($5.4M), France ($4.9M) and Germany ($4.1M) leading. China, where the film opens June 27, is the lone major holdback. Universal projects a $230-260 million domestic final and a worldwide finish north of $600 million, a figure that would clear both Spielberg’s last comparable original — 2005’s War of the Worlds — and place Disclosure Day alongside F1: The Movie and How to Train Your Dragon as the summer’s third $500-million-plus title.
The runner-up was Warner Bros’ Obsession, the Florence Pugh psychological thriller now in its fifth week, which added $14.8 million for a domestic cume approaching $200 million — a result Forbes called “the kind of late-cycle hold the theatrical business has not seen since Top Gun: Maverick.” Lionsgate’s Michael, the Antoine Fuqua-directed Michael Jackson biopic that became the highest-grossing music biopic in history last weekend, slipped to fourth with $9.2 million, while Scary Movie and Masters of the Universe rounded out the top six on the back of broader family-audience attendance returning to multiplexes.
Spielberg used the weekend to promote the film at the Tribeca Film Festival alongside co-star Colman Domingo, who told Variety on Saturday night that working on the project had genuinely shifted his own beliefs on extraterrestrial life: “It can’t just be us.” The Eastern Herald has tracked the picture from its first trailer through the weekend opening, including its Tom Cruise-Emily Blunt press tour, and will follow Tuesday’s Monday-night Wall Street reaction as Comcast (NBCUniversal) reports the first Monday with hard numbers in the bag.
