Disclosure Day‘s summer box office run is being called a rough spot for Steven Spielberg. The sci-fi thriller landed at $116 million domestic and $241 million worldwide, short of the roughly $300 million the film reportedly needed to clear. That gap is being framed as a real setback, even with a full marketing push behind the release.
Matt Belloni and Scott Mendelson Grade Disclosure Day‘s Box Office Run
On a recent episode of The Town with Matt Belloni, host Matt Belloni and Puck box office analyst Scott Mendelson graded the film’s performance as part of their running summer report card.
“Domestic, it got to 116. Worldwide, 241. Not enough. They wanted this movie to do at least 300. I think it’s a ding for Spielberg. I don’t think automatically he is a summer movie director anymore, especially on an original story,” said Belloni.
Both hosts said they saw the warning signs coming before release. Belloni had rated his own confidence in the film a four out of ten, while his co-host landed even lower at a three, and they pointed to the same pre-release nerves as the reason why.
The pair also weighed Disclosure Day against Spielberg’s more recent work, including The Fabelmans, and noted the pressure of comparisons to Ready Player One.
“I think it was a better movie than people gave it credit for. It was, but I think it, they were pumping it up and saying it’s Spielberg back in Spielberg form. He hasn’t made a great movie since The Fabelmans was his last movie,” Mendelson declared.
Between the box office shortfall and the stalled awards push built around Emily Blunt‘s performance, the hosts agreed the film’s outcome complicates the idea that Spielberg can still open an original story the way he once did.
In Disclosure Day, that original premise centers on a tense global reckoning when world governments are forced to declassify decades of concealed extraterrestrial contact, following a whistleblower scientist and a veteran journalist racing against time and state intelligence to confirm whether the imminent arrival signals humanity’s salvation or its extinction.
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