Disclosure Day On Track For Steven Spielberg’s Best Box Office Debut In 18 Years

Disclosure Day is abducting more cash than expected.

The new Steven Spielberg sci-fi movie is his latest alien-related feature after a career dotted with them, including 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 1982’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and 2005’s War of the Worlds. 2026’s Disclosure Day follows meteorologist Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) being thrown together with whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) as he works to expose the cover-up of proof of extraterrestrial life. The movie’s star-studded cast also includes Colman Domingo, Eve Hewson, Wyatt Russell, and Colin Firth.

Per Deadline, as of Saturday morning, Disclosure Day is projected to earn a 3-day total of $44 million by the end of its debut weekend at the domestic box office. It’s launching well ahead of its initial $35 million projections with a total that surpasses the $41.8 million domestic debut of 2018’s Ready Player One to give Disclosure Day the best opening weekend for a Steven Spielberg movie since 2008’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (which happens to be his most recent movie about aliens, though their presence in the story was a surprise reveal).

Below, see a breakdown of the opening weekends (or primary wide expansion weekends) for every Steven Spielberg movie since 2008:

This solid debut has allowed Disclosure Day to take No. 1 at the domestic box office. While this was essentially always a guarantee, as it is the only major summer tentpole debuting this weekend, it has considerably widened the margin between itself and the No. 2 movie, the sleeper horror hit Obsession, which is projected to earn a 3-day domestic total of $21 million during its fifth weekend with yet another astonishingly slim week-on-week drop of 17%.

However, it still remains to be seen if the new Steven Spielberg movie will be able to break even. The reported budget of Disclosure Day is a whopping $115 million. Because big-budget Hollywood movies often need to earn back two and a half times their price tags in order to end up in the black in theaters, this could place the movie’s estimated break-even point as high as $287.5 million.

While two of the most recent movies to hit that rough total worldwide had much bigger domestic debuts (2026’s The Mandalorian and Grogu, which debuted with $81.7 million and currently has $298.2 million worldwide, and 2023’s Five Nights at Freddy’s, which debuted with $80 million and earned $291.5 million overall), 2022’s Elvis debuted much lower with $31.2 million and eventually climbed to $287.7 million, proving that Disclosure Day has a chance if it shows strong audience retention.

Ultimately, the new Steven Spielberg movie could break even in theaters off the strength of its reception from both critics and audiences. Disclosure Day reviews have been strong, earning it a Certified Fresh Rotten Tomatoes score of 80% and a nearly matching 75% score from verified audience members on the Popcornmeter. Audiences have also given it a reasonably solid CinemaScore of B.

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