Disclosure Day is one of the 2026 movie releases that I’ve had my eye on ever since I learned it was Steven Spielberg’s first alien movie in 20 years. Did you know that the script also took a wild amount of drafts to get right? I was so curious about this fun fact, and the screenwriter told me about one character that probably held up filming the most.
How The Lengthy Disclosure Day Script Process Started
Steven Spielberg started jotting his ideas for Disclosure Day down in the summer of 2023 on the Notes app of his iPad. The story that allows him to continue to explore his lifelong fascination with extraterrestrials quickly turned into a 52-page treatment that he then sent to David Koepp, whom he’s worked with before on Jurassic Park, War of the Worlds and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. In CinemaBlend’s interview with Koepp, the screenwriter recalled his first thoughts to the email with these words:
My initial response was, ‘Holy smokes, he's really going there with this idea, all the way.’ And then I got to the end, and the last ten pages of the treatment that he sent me were so compelling and they worked so well. You so desperately wanted the characters to succeed at what they'd set out to do.
While many of Spielberg’s films have come from his own story ideas before becoming some of the best sci-fi movies ever made, he’s only personally written the scripts for a handful of movies over the years: Firelight, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Poltergeist, A.I. Artificial Intelligence and The Fabelmans. Here’s how Koepp became Disclosure Day’s screenwriter, per our chat:
I thought this movie will work because if the ending works already everything else can be made to work if it's in an early phase… Now in terms of the rest of it, ‘Maybe combine this, do this, shorten that. I was confused here,’ the usual notes you would give. And then he worked on it some more and said, ‘Well, why don't you write it?’ And I said, ‘I'm in. I thought you'd never ask.’
When describing his collaboration with Spielberg, which have led to these iconic lightning-in-a-bottle movies before, David Koepp told me the filmmaker is “demanding”, but always “encouraging.” And in the instance of this particular collaboration, it took 42 drafts to get the script right before the movie was shot. But why?
What Caused The Most Back And Forth
It turns out there was a particular character in Disclosure Day that Koepp and Spielberg just couldn’t stop fine-tuning throughout the writing process. As Koepp shared:
I think getting Margaret's character right was probably the area where we paid the most attention. She was always interesting from the get go. A character who suddenly starts speaking Russian and Korean for inexplicable reasons is going to be interesting.
I think this answer makes so much sense, because her character is one of the strongest parts of the film. That's not only from my perspective – it has been called out a bunch in Disclosure Day reviews. Blunt is the MVP of the film, but part of that needed to come through in the written final draft.
What took time in multiple drafts and thought was, ‘How does this affect her emotionally over the course of the film?’ Not just, ‘Can she do cool things?’ but ‘What does that do to a person?’ ‘How does she start to break down?’ ‘Does she suffer from that?’ ‘What are the real human aspects of what's happening to her?’ Not just the cool movie stuff. ‘What would that be like for a person?’ And I think that that takes time, and that's probably where we spent the most time.
I also have to wonder if knowing people would perk up like I did over a new sci-fi movie from Spielberg meant they didn’t want to disappoint fans of with a subpar followup? He has a reputation to uphold! But 42 drafts? I mean, wow, that's a lot of tries to get Blunt's character just so.
You can decide for yourself how Disclosure Day stacks up to your favorite sci-fi movies by catching it in theaters now.
