Disclosure Day’s Box Office Reveals a New Generation Gap

The disclosure has not, seemingly, had the desired effect. Over its second weekend in theaters, Steven Spielberg’s talky, two-hour-25-minute sci-fi chase-pursuit potboiler Disclosure Day declined by a steep 62 percent from its opening ticket-taking tally. That’s a drop-off of nearly two-thirds — from $44 million domestically over weekend one to $17 million this last Friday to Sunday — spelling trouble for the movie’s long-term playability, albeit with certain caveats. Disclosure Day entered the multiplex as the Close Encounters of the Third Kind filmmaker’s best-ever non-franchise/non-adaptation opening (i.e., one of his non–Indiana Jones titles that’s also not an adaptation of War of the Worlds). In the span of a week, however, D Day got blasted out of the sandbox by Pixar’s Toy Story 5, this year’s biggest opening with $160 million in North American ticket sales alone (and $312 million worldwide).

With its reported $115 million production budget and additional $80 million marketing spend, Disclosure Day needs to gross $300 million to break even. And as the summer-movie marketplace crowds with ever-bigger impending blockbusters — Minions & Monsters (July 1), Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey on July 17, and Spider-Man: Brand New Day (July 31) among them — D Day’s studio distributor, Universal, had been counting on a second-weekend boost or, at a minimum, not such a precipitous fall. Toward that end, exit data from PostTrak indicated 60 percent of Disclosure Day’s opening-weekend attendees were over the age of 35, with 55 percent specifically citing Spielberg as their primary reason for showing up. Further, as the received Hollywood wisdom goes, grown folk are more likely than youngs to punch their AMC A-List cards off-peak in the darkening afterglow beyond opening weekend.

Here’s the trouble with that two-thirds drop-off: At a time when Gen Z has been revealed by a recent Fandango survey to be the most active cinema-going demographic and the driving force of movie box office, not only are the anticipated adults turning out in scant numbers for Spielberg’s personal, quasi-spiritual meditation on UFOs and human not-alone-ness in the universe, but word of mouth among the Youth has been dismissive of Disclosure Day — not to mention of the 79-year-old director himself — as “for boomers,” further curtailing the film’s ability to leg out into profitability.

Among the social-media posts boomer-bombing D Day: “So … Disclosure Day is boomer Arrival.” “Disclosure Day is a fumbling, awkward, but warm hug from your grandfather.” “You can tell Disclosure Day was directed by an 80 year old because its [sic] about how you can save the world by watching the news.”

The obvious box-office contrast is with Focus Features’ surprise blockbuster Obsession, which came out last month. Directed by 26-year-old YouTube sensation Curry Barker and largely connecting with fellow digital natives of his own generation or younger, the $750,000 horror flick saw its audience share grow by 40 percent over its second weekend in theaters. Then it increased again by a further 10 percent over weekend three, a nearly unheard-of financial pattern about as rare in Hollywood’s Thirty Mile Zone as a superagent with a conscience. (Bitter irony that the last movie to obliterate its own opening-weekend ticket sales over the second and third weekends in theatrical release was … Spielberg’s E.T. in 1982.) Obsession’s cumulative box-office total now stands at $333.2 million worldwide, making it Focus’ highest-grossing film to date.

Creating further polarity between Obsession and Disclosure Day, Universal spent heavily on TV ads: the kind of legacy marketing specifically targeting Gen X on through to the elderly that Generation Alpha, Gen Z, and zillennials tend to completely blank. Trailer spots during the Winter Olympics, Super Bowl LX, and the NBA playoffs alone reportedly cost the studio $24 million. Meanwhile, Focus — Universal’s scrappy art-house and genre division — confined its prerelease awareness push for Obsession to social-media and viral marketing strategies including mall holograms and the sale of cult merch (the film’s One Wish Willow). And those ultimately engendered a robust word-of-mouth buzz and repeated viewings.

Then there is the Spielberg of it all. Though he may be the highest-grossing director in cinematic history with cumulative box-office earnings of nearly $11 billion, the Oscar-winning icon has been wildly inconsistent over his last few theatrical outings — a far cry from the box-office rainmaker Spielberg was from the ’70s to the early ’90s. His 2022 autobiographical family drama, The Fabelmans, proved a critical hit but a financial dud, and his adaptation of West Side Story was a straight-up flop (with losses reportedly running to $100 million). On the flip side, SS’s 2017 fact-based newspaper drama The Post was nominated for a raft of Oscars including Best Picture and grossed $179 million on a $50 million budget. And his adaptation of the seminal gamer novel Ready Player One grossed a healthy $583 million worldwide.

According to an insider with decades of dealings with the director, Spielberg is well aware of perceptions of his commercial cold streak and specifically set about to reverse course with Disclosure Day. “He made his Bridge of Spies, his Fabelmans and West Side Story, and they didn’t make money,” this person says. “So he wanted to have Amblin prosper. He wanted this to be a summer movie. A popcorn movie. A smart movie for the masses.”

To be sure, Disclosure Day arrives as Spielberg’s third original title in the last half-century focused around his abiding fascination with extraterrestrial life and its jumbled intersection with Homo sapiens. But in the final analysis, the crux of the movie’s Gen Z–versus–boomer schism may boil down to its major third-act reveal. (Minor spoilers to follow.) For a generation whose prefrontal cortices are reaching maturity in an era when previously classified tranches of records “related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) and unidentified flying objects (UFOS)” continue to hit the internet with numbing regularity, the movie’s penultimate revelation of governmental E.T. suppression seems somewhat anticlimactic — an outdated modality.

David A. Gross, box-office analyst behind the movie-industry newsletter FranchiseRE, disputes Disclosure Day’s widely cited $300 million break-even figure. He points to downstream revenues a title with this pedigree is likely to generate for its ability to enter the promised land of bankability. “Disclosure Day is a particular kind of Steven Spielberg movie — an original sci-fi thriller — and it’s done well,” Gross says. “I think in general, people underestimate the money that a movie like this can make in ancillary business: digital sales and rental, streaming and free TV. The film will play well in every market in the world except China, where it is doing just okay. I believe it will get to break even that way and probably become profitable.”