David Koepp's Disclosure Day Screenplay

Who Is David Koepp?

David Koepp is one of Hollywood's most bankable and prolific screenwriters. His films have collectively grossed over $6 billion worldwide, making him one of the highest-grossing screenwriters in cinema history. He is the quiet architect behind some of the biggest blockbusters ever made.

What sets Koepp apart is not just commercial success but a rare ability to write spectacle that serves character. His scripts are lean, propulsive, and rooted in the experience of ordinary people caught in extraordinary circumstances. That sensibility makes him the ideal writer for a film about the moment alien life is disclosed to the world.

The Spielberg-Koepp Partnership

Disclosure Day marks David Koepp's 5th collaboration with Steven Spielberg over more than three decades. Their creative partnership is one of the most enduring writer-director relationships in modern Hollywood.

It began with Jurassic Park in 1993, where Koepp adapted Michael Crichton's novel into one of the most successful screenplays ever written. That film demonstrated what would become the hallmark of their collaborations: grounding impossible scenarios in deeply human reactions. When the T. rex breaks loose, Koepp's script ensures we feel it through the eyes of terrified children, not just through spectacle.

They reunited for The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997), War of the Worlds (2005), and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008). Across these films, a pattern emerges: Spielberg turns to Koepp when the story demands a balance of scale and intimacy, when the spectacle must serve the human experience rather than overwhelm it.

With Disclosure Day, the pairing feels especially significant. This is not merely another blockbuster collaboration; it is Spielberg returning to the alien-contact genre he helped define, with the writer who helped him craft War of the Worlds — his darkest, most grounded take on extraterrestrial life. That film stripped away the wonder of Close Encounters and E.T. in favor of survival horror told through one family's perspective. Disclosure Day appears to be charting a middle path: awe and terror, wonder and institutional paranoia.

Is Disclosure Day a Close Encounters Sequel?

One of the most persistent questions surrounding the film is whether it connects to Spielberg's 1977 masterpiece Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The visual parallels in the Super Bowl trailer were impossible to miss: a mothership design that mirrors the original, crop circles, and the theme of ordinary people drawn into contact events.

When asked directly, Koepp has been characteristically cagey:

That non-denial is itself revealing. Koepp is too precise a writer to accidentally fuel speculation. The careful phrasing — "questions that have been on his mind since the 1970s" — suggests that even if Disclosure Day is not a literal sequel, it is a spiritual successor. A film born from the same obsessions but refracted through fifty years of new context: the real-world UFO disclosure movement, government transparency debates, and a cultural moment where the possibility of extraterrestrial life has shifted from fringe theory to congressional testimony.

Themes in the Screenplay

Based on trailers, interviews, and Koepp's own comments, the screenplay for Disclosure Day appears to wrestle with several interconnected themes.

These themes align perfectly with Koepp's strengths. His best scripts have always been about control — who has it, who loses it, and what ordinary people do when the systems they trust fail them. Jurassic Park is about the illusion of control over nature. War of the Worlds is about the total collapse of control. Disclosure Day appears to ask: what happens when the biggest secret in human history can no longer be controlled?

Writing the Alien Communication Scene

The film's most talked-about sequence — the possession scene where Emily Blunt's meteorologist begins speaking an alien language on live television — is a testament to Koepp's craft. Writing a scene where a human character is overtaken by an extraterrestrial presence, on a live broadcast, is an extraordinary screenwriting challenge.

The scene must accomplish several things simultaneously: establish the reality of alien contact, create visceral horror, generate sympathy for the character, and set the entire plot in motion. It must feel both terrifyingly alien and deeply human. According to early descriptions, the script handles this by keeping the camera tight on Blunt's face as the transformation happens — the spectacle is not the alien presence itself but the human being experiencing it.

This approach is quintessential Koepp. In War of the Worlds, the alien tripods are terrifying not because of their design but because we experience them through Tom Cruise's panicked flight with his children. The horror is human-scale. The Disclosure Day possession scene applies the same principle: the alien is filtered through the human vessel, making it more disturbing precisely because it is more intimate.

Balancing Spectacle with Character

If there is one signature that defines David Koepp's screenwriting career, it is his ability to write blockbuster set pieces that never lose sight of the people inside them. This is not a trivial skill. Many big-budget screenplays treat characters as vehicles for spectacle. Koepp does the opposite: the spectacle is a vehicle for character.

Consider the evidence from the Disclosure Day trailers. The Super Bowl spot revealed warships hovering over cities, crop circles appearing across farmland, and widespread global chaos. These are massive-scale images. But every one is anchored to a character's reaction. We see the ships through someone's eyes. We see the panic through someone's fear.

Koepp has spoken about this approach in general terms over the years: the audience does not care about a building falling down. They care about the person inside the building. Disclosure Day, with its global-scale premise and intimate character focus, appears to be the ultimate expression of this philosophy.

The "Seven Billion People" Concept

One of the screenplay's most powerful ideas is captured in a single line from the trailer, spoken by Josh O'Connor's whistleblower character:

This line encapsulates the moral framework of the entire screenplay. It reframes alien disclosure as a question of rights — not national security, not scientific inquiry, but the fundamental right of every human being to know the truth about their place in the universe.

It is a deceptively simple idea with enormous implications. If the truth belongs to everyone, then any institution that withholds it — government, military, intelligence agencies — is committing an act of theft against the entire species. The screenplay appears to build its central conflict around this tension: the few who want to keep the secret versus the billions who deserve to know.

The number itself — seven billion — is significant. It grounds the story in the present moment. This is not abstract science fiction. This is a screenplay about us, right now, and the question of whether we can handle the truth.

How Koepp Approached the Real-World UFO Movement

Writing Disclosure Day in the mid-2020s meant writing into a cultural moment where UFO disclosure was no longer science fiction. Congressional hearings on UAPs (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena), Pentagon-released footage of unexplained aerial objects, and whistleblower testimony from intelligence officials had shifted the conversation from the fringe to the mainstream.

Koepp did not ignore this. By all accounts, the screenplay engages directly with the language, anxieties, and institutional dynamics of the real-world disclosure movement. The film features government cover-ups, whistleblowers, and the tension between national security secrecy and public transparency — themes ripped from actual headlines.

This gives the screenplay a layer of verisimilitude that sets it apart from traditional alien-contact films. When O'Connor's character pushes for disclosure, he is not operating in a purely fictional framework. He is echoing real people — David Grusch, Luis Elizondo, and others — who have testified before Congress about what the government knows. Koepp's script draws power from the fact that its fictional premise is uncomfortably close to reality.

A Track Record with Blockbuster Sci-Fi

Koepp's filmography reads like a masterclass in blockbuster science fiction screenwriting. His scripts have a combined worldwide gross exceeding $6 billion, but the numbers tell only part of the story. What matters is the kind of blockbusters he writes.

Each of these films shares a common trait: they feel real. Koepp's dinosaurs behave like animals, not monsters. His aliens are existential threats, not cartoon villains. His superheroes have mundane problems. This grounding in reality is exactly what Disclosure Day demands — a film about alien contact that feels like it could happen tomorrow.

What Colman Domingo's Reaction Tells Us

Domingo is not an actor who signs on to films for spectacle. His body of work — Rustin, Sing Sing, Euphoria — demonstrates a commitment to emotionally authentic storytelling. For a script to move him to tears, it must contain more than alien invasions and government conspiracies. It must contain genuine human truth.

This reaction strongly suggests that the Disclosure Day screenplay, beneath its blockbuster premise, is a deeply emotional piece of writing. It aligns with Koepp's career-long approach: use the spectacle as a delivery mechanism for something that hits the audience in the chest. The dinosaurs in Jurassic Park are awe-inspiring, but the film endures because of the wonder in a paleontologist's eyes. The tripods in War of the Worlds are terrifying, but the film works because of a father trying to protect his children.

If Domingo cried, the screenplay has something at its core that transcends genre. The disclosure of alien life is the premise. The human response to that disclosure — the fear, the wonder, the grief, the reckoning — is the story. And that is what David Koepp writes better than almost anyone working today.

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