Steven Spielberg fans are convinced the directing maestro’s next film is a secret sequel to one of his classic films.
The Jaws and Jurassic Park filmmaker will release his new film, Disclosure Day, in June, and following the release of a new trailer, sleuths believe they’ve worked out that the film will have a spine-tingling link to Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Close Encounters, released in 1977, starred Richard Dreyfuss as a man from small-town Indiana whose life changes after he encounters a UFO.
Disclosure Day, released 48 years later, tells the story of a television meteorologist (Emily Blunt) who, alongside a mysterious character played by Josh O’Connor, attempts to reveal the truth behind an alien conspiracy being hidden by the government.
The new trailer has references to Roswell – where conspiracy theorists believe a UFO crashed in New Mexico in 1947 – and in the closing moments, a flying saucer appears to emerge from the sky, which looks like a direct nod to a similar scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
It’s this moment that has convinced film fans Disclosure Day could very well be a sequel-of-sorts to Spielberg’s classic.
“Finally saw the new Disclosure Day trailer…I’m starting to actually believe the Close Encounters rumour,” one person wrote on X/Twitter, with another calling the UFO shot “pretty damning” evidence.
They added: “I wouldn’t put it past Spielberg, and it would explain why they’ve played so coy about it thus far.”
There has been an element of mystery surrounding the project and its plot. Others highlighted that many of the character’s names are yet to be revealed, with some theorising that O’Connor’s character could have the same surname as Dreyfuss’s Close Encounters character, Roy Neary.
Disclosure Day, which will be released on 12 June, also stars Colin Firth, Eve Hewson and Colman Domingo.
An official logline for the film teases: “If you found out you weren’t alone, if someone showed you, proved it to you, would that frighten you? This summer, the truth belongs to seven billion people. We are coming close to... Disclosure Day.”
It’s the latest Spielberg film to explore the alien genre following Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 1982’s ET the Extra-Terrestrial, 2005’s War of the Worlds and 2008’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
Close Encounters was a box office smash, grossing $306.9m (£231.4m) from a budget of $19.4m (£14.6m). It was the third biggest film of the year behind Star Wars – A New Hope and Smokey and the Bandit.
Spielberg, 79, has directed four sequels in his illustrious career – four sequels in his career: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997) and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008).
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