Stop Calling Disclosure Day the Next Matrix Before You've Bought a Ticket

9 days ago by Riley Vox 7 min read

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The Paris premiere happened a week ago. The film opens wide in America on Friday. And somehow, on the strength of a trailer, a Williams score, and a Le Grand Rex afterparty, half the internet has already decided Disclosure Day is a paradigm shift. Look — calm down. Here's the part nobody wants to say out loud.

Spielberg is back. John Williams is back for collaboration number thirty. David Koepp wrote the screenplay — yes, that David Koepp, the Jurassic Park guy. Emily Blunt and Josh O'Connor are stars. The premiere at Le Grand Rex on June 2 reportedly went so well that critics walked out calling it "top-tier Spielberg," "as exhilarating as Raiders," and — the one I cannot let go — "Spielberg's best film in 20 years."

Wide US release is this Friday, June 12. IMAX. Limited 70mm. Standard screens. A full-court press.

And we, the audience, have collectively decided we already know what this movie is.

Look, I'm going. Of course I'm going. I am Riley Vox and a Spielberg sci-fi joint opening on IMAX in June is the closest thing my calendar has to a religious obligation. But before we crown a movie nobody outside one Paris theater has actually paid to see, can we slow down for a minute?

The Paris Premiere Is Not a Verdict

Here's the thing about premieres at Le Grand Rex: they are not test screenings. They are not previews. They are events. The director is in the room. The stars are in the room. John Williams might be in the room. The audience is composed largely of people who got dressed up to be there.

Nobody walks out of that room and tells the nearest journalist "yeah, it was fine, three stars." Either the room is electric and you say something quotable, or the room is dead and you say nothing at all. The reactions we got — the Raiders comparisons, the "best in 20 years" line — those are the electric room version of feedback. Which is great. It means the movie probably isn't a disaster.

It does not mean it is a masterpiece. It means it played like one to people in tuxedos at the Champs-Élysées on a Tuesday night.

The Matrix Comparison Is Where I Get Off the Train

If I read one more breathless tweet calling Disclosure Day "the next Matrix" I am going to walk into the Atlantic Ocean.

The Matrix didn't earn that label from a premiere reaction. It earned it from what happened after. Bullet time became a verb. Every action movie for the next decade ripped off the lobby shootout, the long-coat aesthetic, and the green-tinted color grade. Philosophy professors started assigning the movie. The Wachowskis fundamentally changed what a Hollywood blockbuster was allowed to look like and what it was allowed to be about. A paradigm shift is a thing you can only identify in retrospect, by counting the imitators.

Disclosure Day is asking us to skip all of that and award it the trophy on day one. On the basis of what, exactly? A trailer that won Best Summer 2026 Blockbuster at the Golden Trailer Awards — congratulations, that is a trailer-editing prize, not a cinema-history prize. A Paris afterparty. A 145-minute runtime. A budget number ($115M, which is honestly modest for a Spielberg event picture in 2026).

A paradigm shift requires aftermath. You don't get one of those before the film has had a US opening weekend.

John Williams Is Doing a Lot of Heavy Lifting

This is collaboration number thirty between Spielberg and Williams. Thirty. There are working marriages with worse track records.

And I love John Williams. I love him so much it is embarrassing. But here is an uncomfortable question I want everyone who saw the Paris cut to ask themselves before they post their next superlative: were you responding to the movie, or were you responding to the score?

Williams could score a tax audit and people would walk out of the screening saying it had "profound emotional ambition." The brass swells, the strings come in, the Spielberg push-in happens, and your nervous system files a glowing review before your prefrontal cortex has finished reading the subtitles. It is a chemical reaction. It has been weaponized against us for fifty years and it works every single time.

I am not saying the score is the only thing. I am saying that if you cannot articulate one specific thing the movie does that the score isn't doing for it, you have not actually reviewed the movie. You have reviewed John Williams. And John Williams has been undefeated since 1975.

We've Been to This Premise Before — With This Director

A whistleblower (Josh O'Connor) leaks classified government secrets about alien contact and triggers a global event called Disclosure Day.

That is a fantastic logline. It is also extremely familiar Spielberg territory. Close Encounters of the Third Kind came out in 1977 and was, in its quieter way, about exactly this — ordinary people pulled into contact with something the government already knew about and was hiding. War of the Worlds in 2005 did the bad-version-of-the-same-evening, where the disclosure happens to you personally and your tripod's already in the driveway.

This is not a knock. Spielberg returning to a thematic well he dug himself can be transcendent — see also: the eight different times he has made a movie about a missing or absent father. The risk is the opposite. The risk is Ready Player One-with-aliens: a movie that knows how to push every button on the Spielberg dashboard but stops short of being about anything specific to 2026.

The great version of Disclosure Day is Close Encounters with the political vocabulary of the post-2017 Pentagon UAP report era — a film that understands that in real life, the government has already partially disclosed, the public has already partially shrugged, and the actual story is what happens when revelation no longer means catharsis. The mid version is competent IMAX spectacle with a Williams score that makes you cry on cue. Both of those movies are possible. They are also two completely different movies.

What I Will Actually Be Watching For On Friday

Forget the discourse. Here is my real checklist:

1. Is Emily Blunt's performance the thing? The Paris crowd called it "all-time." That is a load-bearing claim. If the movie's center of gravity is her, the film has a chance to be the great version.
2. Does Spielberg trust us with quiet? His best films breathe. His weaker ones panic and cut. A 145-minute runtime is either a flex or a warning sign.
3. Is the disclosure idea actually in 2026, or did Koepp write a 1997 script? This is the David Koepp question. He's a working professional who has rescued a dozen blockbusters from incoherence. He has also written some that aged into amber the moment they opened.
4. What does Williams's score do when it stops? If the movie still works in the silences, the movie works. If everything dies the second the strings drop out, we have our answer.

The Bottom Line

I want Disclosure Day to be great. I want it to be the Spielberg sci-fi event we have been waiting twenty years for. The trailer is genuinely thrilling. The cast is genuinely stacked. The Paris reactions are genuinely encouraging.

None of that is the same thing as the movie being great.

Don't buy the discourse before you buy the ticket. The discourse is free, and as a rule, things that are free have been priced accordingly. The ticket is the point. We will know on Friday, and not one second before.

See you in the IMAX line. I'll be the one not posting until I've actually seen it.