Steven Spielberg began tackling the story for his latest movie, "Disclosure Day," after a rare sequence of two films that fell flat at the box office.

He started writing in 2023, a year after the release of "The Fabelmans," an award-winning film based on his childhood that underperformed financially. Spielberg’s adaptation of "West Side Story" in 2021 was also a commercial failure despite also being a critical darling. The back-to-back misses called into question whether the inventor of blockbuster cinema – "Jaws," "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and "Saving Private Ryan" – would ever return to directing must-see spectacles he was previously known for.

"Disclosure Day," about a cover-up by the U.S. government and defense contractors of the fact that aliens have lived on Earth since at least the Roswell crash in 1947, retreads a genre that used to be a surefire bet for Spielberg. It’s being released by Comcast Corp.’s Universal Pictures on June 12 and is projected to gross as much as $50 million in the U.S. and Canada in its first weekend. That would top "Jurassic Park" as the strongest opening performance of any film in Spielberg’s career, excluding remakes and sequels and not accounting for inflation.

"Disclosure Day" has a critics score of 82% on RottenTomatoes, and fans of Spielberg’s major sci-fi hits "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial" can expect a “spellbinding return to what he does best,” critic David Rooney wrote in the Hollywood Reporter. It’s also the first movie in almost two decades that Spielberg is directing from a script written by "Jurassic Park" screenwriter David Koepp. Spielberg endorsed Koepp on a May 31 episode of "The Rewatchables" podcast as “one of the most commercial screenwriters in Hollywood history.”

With a production budget of roughly $115 million and about $80 million in marketing spending, "Disclosure Day" will need to sell at least $300 million worth of tickets globally to break even in cinemas before it recoups costs through pay-per-view. The movie is one of Universal’s highest profile bets this summer, alongside a new "Minions" picture and Christopher Nolan’s "The Odyssey." The studio has already notched major wins this year with "The Super Mario Galaxy Movie" and "Obsession," from specialty label Focus Features, which has grossed more than $230 million on a budget of less than $1 million.

Universal has pulled out all the stops to make "Disclosure Day" another success and to reintroduce Spielberg to moviegoers as a blockbuster director. The campaign, which began in December, has featured cryptic billboards in Times Square and Los Angeles, ads during the Super Bowl and the Winter Olympics and origami cardinal birds with QR codes that drove people to purchase advance tickets.

In recent weeks, Spielberg, who historically has preferred to let his films speak for themselves rather than be the face of publicity initiatives, has done interviews with Stephen Colbert and Michelle Obama and made appearances on popular cinephile podcasts, such as "The Big Picture" and "On Film… with Kevin McCarthy."

In April, the 79-year-old director attended the world’s largest conference of cinema operators in Las Vegas for the first time ever and urged the movie business to keep supporting original stories like "Disclosure Day." It’s also Spielberg’s first release since 2018’s "Ready Player One" to go straight to Imax Corp.’s giant, and higher priced screens, which are accounting for an ever-greater portion of box office sales of contemporary blockbusters.

In a serendipitous boost, interest in unidentified aerial phenomena and possible visitations from off-world species has soared since May, when the Pentagon started releasing hundreds of declassified files related to potential alien technology sightings spanning decades. The coincidence has spurred a conspiracy theory suggesting the director has been working with the White House to prepare the public for the possibility that humans aren’t alone in the universe.

“This was not planned, I’m not a plant of the Pentagon or the government or any deep state contracting company,” Spielberg said on the space-black carpet of the film’s premiere at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts on June 8. “I’m literally a filmmaker who has wanted to tell this story for many, many years, but I had no idea that things were going to be disclosed just as 'Disclosure Day' was about to be disclosed.”

The director’s interest in space and aliens stems from witnessing a meteor shower with his father when he was 6 years old, he said. Although the script for "Disclosure Day" was written in 2023, Spielberg began sketching out the film’s plot in 2017 after the New York Times published videos of unidentified craft recorded by U.S. Navy fighter pilots attached to the USS Nimitz. One eyewitness aboard the ship estimated that the technology was anywhere between a century to millennia more advanced than any known modern-day and man-made military instruments.

Spielberg is re-embracing the blockbuster form not as an exercise in nostalgia, but as a vehicle to explore wonder, uncertainty and the possibility that humanity isn’t alone. It’s a theory he has pondered in much of his beloved filmography. Beyond "Disclosure Day" becoming a commercial hit, Spielberg joked in an interview with Turner Classic Movies host Ben Mankiewicz that another measure of the film’s success would be whether it results in him experiencing some version of the alien encounters he’s served up for audiences throughout his career.

“I need a sighting,” Spielberg said. “I mean, I’m an ambassador to these guys, and they haven’t shown themselves to me? I don’t get that.”

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