Movies

Steven Spielberg's Disclosure Day Has Some Strange Assumptions About the Media

The best way to release secret footage of alien life is…local TV news? 

Peter Suderman | 6.12.2026 10:10 AM

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(Universal Pictures)

Given the recent success of Backrooms, a movie based on a YouTube series that was itself based on a meme, it's tempting to view Steven Spielberg's often crackling but frequently frustrating Disclosure Day in the same light. This is the beard's riff on the old "ancient aliens" meme, the popular-on-the-internet History Channel freeze frame featuring a zap-haired "expert" who somehow always seemed to be conveying the same amusingly crazy idea: I'm not saying it was ancient aliens—but it was ancient aliens. 

Spoiler alert: In Spielberg's movie, the aliens aren't quite ancient; they've only been around since the 1940s, at least as far as the United States government and its sinister corporate tentacles know. But this isn't much of a spoiler, given the trailers and the fact that the basics of alien existence are revealed to the viewer by the end of the first act. 

Indeed, that's the setup, rather than the resolution: aliens exist, there is copious archival footage to prove it, and shadowy forces have been engaged in a massive cover-up in order to gain power over alien technology and cow the public. The movie, then, is about the quest to release the evidence to the world. 

That quest starts with the hacker Daniel Kellner, played with quiet intensity by the increasingly excellent Josh O'Connor, who makes off with a cache of drives containing classified footage depicting........

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