Steven Spielberg’s First Sci-Fi Movie in 8 Years Beats Box Office Expectations

After being overlooked for the better part of a month, older audiences returned to theaters this past weekend with renewed energy to watch Steven Spielberg's first sci-fi film in eight years, Disclosure Day. Universal began promoting the film in earnest relatively late in the game; by comparison, the marketing campaign for Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey was already underway. But the studio lucked out with real-world events foreshadowing some of the movie's ideas, with the Pentagon unredacting tranches of documents purporting to show unidentified aerial phenomena, or, in layman's terms, UFO activity. Spielberg himself was the face of the film's marketing campaign, and was sent on an expansive publicity tour. He was also given Arnold Schwarzenegger-style billing in the movie's promotional material. This strategy seems to have worked, with Disclosure Day exceeding expectations in its box-office debut.