I Liked ‘Disclosure Day,’ Then the Internet Told Me I Was Wrong

Disclosure Day is not the movie I anticipated. It’s not a frightful alien domination story; it’s also not an endlessly pulse-pounding, cat-and-mouse chase either. It’s something a little quieter. It raises questions about the intersection of faith and discovery and dares to be hopeful about humanity. It is also home to Emily Blunt’s career-best performance.

It’s also imperfect. In the background of the story’s main plot is the world at war with itself again, and the notion is (if you can imagine) that it’s particularly grim. For me, this could’ve been more overt—humanity being its own greatest threat, our extinction being at our own hands, only for us to come together with the shared knowledge of that which is greater than any one of us. Also, dropping the audience into the middle of the story was mostly a good idea, but at times it had me racing to figure out the character relationships that had been built exclusively off-screen. (I’ve read that a second viewing helps with this, and that in general this is a two-watch film, which I love.)

These are my main misgivings to an otherwise delightful night at the cinema. Nobody moves the camera like Steven Speilberg does, and I’ll never skip out on an opportunity to see one of his movies on the big screen.

I intentionally stayed offline the week leading up to Disclosure Day. I didn’t read a single review. I unfollowed every entertainment outlet I could, I didn’t visit Rotten Tomatoes (which is an entirely different conversation for another day), and I hid specific words from showing up on my feeds. I went in as purely as possible and walked out feeling satisfied. But after glancing at Internet Discourse, I guess I was wrong.

According to the internet, it’s either a career-defining film or, more popularly, the worst movie Spielberg has ever made. It’s neither, but it’s certainly nowhere near his biggest blunders. But that thing that happens when art cuts through the cultural digest is that people seem to be racing to have The Take online, hardly out of the theater before cementing their immediate reactions.

Immediate reactions, instant gratification: pervasive urges that don’t leave much room for art of any sort to settle into our subconscious before we hand out our decrees.

The internet is allergic to sincerity. Sincerity is in Steven Spielberg’s DNA, which already makes for a real divide in how people talk about his movies now. But for film in general, online culture has seemingly disrupted the ability for a person to internalize a movie on an individual level. People don’t strive to be a part of the conversation anymore; they strive to feel included in the conversation that’s already happening. And so, because of algorithms driven by views and engagement and 250-character quips, audiences go to the theater not in search of their own opinion, but to be in on the joke online. Or worse, the joke stops them from going at all.

Since we’re talking about Spielberg, let’s compare this to his 2005 remake of War of the Worlds, his last full-out alien venture.

Growing up, on Fridays my local newspaper put out a weekend edition in full color that I read like a religious text. It listed the weekend events happening in the city, all the pop culture news, but most importantly to me, it had the movie reviews. I read the review for War of the Worlds over breakfast before my last day at Shakespeare Camp (I know, I know), and critics thought the movie was good-not-great, which was certainly enough for audiences to turn out at the theater for it. I saw it that weekend and felt similarly: It was really fun, but not my favorite Spielberg outing.

In the 21 years since, people talk about War of the Worlds with much greater reverence than when it was initially released. Even myself, as I continue to return to it my expectations are much fairer. Not every movie has to redefine film to be good—to be great, even—and to have the opportunity to do well. But I wonder: Are movies allowed to be just good anymore? I genuinely don’t know.

Some movies have this experience of being reverse engineered by the internet like World of the Worlds, where instead of time being unkind to it, it’s made better by it. Movies like Now and Then and Practical Magic were initially critically panned and underperformed theatrically but have since been given second lives through their audiences finding one another online (as well as physical media sales on VHS and DVD, bring back physical media people!). Yet this seems mostly to be offered to movies that came out before the concept of online discourse. If a movie coming out today doesn’t pass the Online Discourse Test, it’s doomed. If you dare to like a movie more than the internet decided you should, you’re not just outside of the actual cultural moment, but you’re also wrong in your assessment. Since film releases are so different now, people can react to movies days before most people actually go see it, driving that conversation into a particular direction before many of us have time to buckle our seatbelts.

It also feeds into the idea that a movie’s shelf life is just one weekend, that its instant box office performance is the single most important factor in a movie’s watchability. Disclosure Day did very well in its opening weekend, making $92.9 million globally over its first three days, higher than its initial projections. But despite being Spielberg’s best-ever opening for an original screenplay, people within the industry couldn’t help but question if it maybe wasn’t worth the cost. One weekend. At most, three days. That’s how much time a movie is allowed to justify itself. It’s not a long journey to go to see how people instantly talk about something online with how people who haven’t yet even seen it may choose not to participate in it at all.

The internet is also contrarian. The horror film Obsession has so far made $297 million at the box office on a reported budget of $750,000. This is an unequivocal, unquestionable success, and a movie that utterly deserves it. It’s one of the best horror films I’ve seen in the last decade, with a central performance by Inde Navarrette that will go down as one of the greatest horror performances of all time. However, this is not without controversy. Pay disparages on a low-budget film that finds success has come under justified fire with Obsession as its example, how those at the top get the most fiscal reward for what those at the bottom helped create.

But now with Disclosure Day out in theaters, I’m seeing people who feel their expectations weren’t met comparing its budget of $115 million to Obsession’s, using Obsession as some sort of new standard that money can’t buy quality. Which can be true, of course. Sometimes what’s expensive is also worse. But which is it? Is Obsession a triumph of indie-filmmaking where bigger budget movies fail, or is it a cautionary tale about the insidious financial underbelly of the film industry?

(Also, $115 million is not a particularly large budget for a big-budget movie today. July’s The Odyssey has a reported budget of $250 million and Spider-Man: Brand New Day reportedly at $275 million. December’s Avengers: Doomsday has an alleged budget of $400 million, maybe—likely—more.)

So, I ask: Is the internet never wrong about art because it can choose not to be? Well, yes. But that doesn’t mean that it’s also always right, either. Opinions! Hurrah! I’m certain time will reveal Disclosure Day for what it is: a perfectly enjoyable, flawed movie. It’s not Spielberg’s best movie. For me, my answer to that question changes every time I watch one of his many masterpieces. It’s definitely not even near his worst, which I do have an answer for and will be keeping to myself, thank you very much.

Am I overreacting? You betcha! But we live in a precarious time for film, and by extension movie theaters. In 2025, the industry deemed the theater experience was dead. This year, theaters have been reporting record-breaking attendance, in large part thanks to original scripts and debut filmmakers. Call me crazy, but I think people should stay offline and go see everything they can in theaters, the reportedly good, bad, and in between, and decide for themselves what they think.