As Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day just hit theaters, David Koepp revisits an aspect of the screenplay that he admits has its limits.
Has Steven Spielberg finally beaten his box-office jinx? At the time this article was written, Disclosure Day had already grossed over $100 million. With a $115 million budget, the film isn’t yet profitable, but it’s already outpacing the box-office totals of his two previous releases, The Fabelmans (about $45.6 million in receipts on a $40 million budget) and West Side Story ($76 million on a $100 million budget).
There are several avenues to understanding this (early) success: Spielberg’s return to science fiction, a genre that has treated him well in the past, or the nearly universal human curiosity about what might lurk in the vast spaces above us. But perhaps also the use of a narrative technique especially effective in cinema for building tension and suspense: the MacGuffin. Even if, as screenwriter David Koepp himself admits, the MacGuffin in Disclosure Day suffers from a small flaw.
KOEPP ON THE FLY
The MacGuffin is a term, attributed to Alfred Hitchcock, describing a storytelling device. It is something a writer invents to set the film’s characters in motion. Widely used in action or suspense cinema, the hero is often tasked with grabbing this object before the antagonist, or protecting it at all costs. Pure pretext, this MacGuffin is often not even defined. A good example appears in Mission: Impossible 3 where everyone fights and races after the “Rabbit’s Foot,” without knowing exactly what the label refers to.
In Disclosure Day, this MacGuffin shows up from the opening sequences: a mysterious extraterrestrial artifact named the “Order.” But here, the object quickly proves to have a real utility in the story. Problem, its powers are multiple and ill-defined. In a piece for the site Den of Geek, David Koepp (the prolific screenwriter behind films like The Negotiator, Mission: Impossible, War of the Worlds or more recently Presence) counted two, admitting that this is too much.
Indeed, in a story where the prevailing feeling is one of being overwhelmed by events, a certain loss of reference points isn’t necessarily a bad thing. And, as David Koepp reminds us, if a certain lack of internal logic isn’t a problem for “making an entertaining film”, he’s not afraid to roll with it.
“Entertaining” may even feel reductive, given how much Screen Large enjoyed Disclosure Day. So yes, Spielberg and Koepp occasionally push the envelope (beyond the MacGuffin, Emily Blunt’s powers also don’t appear to have clear limits), but, in the end, emotion wins. Disclosure Day opened in theaters on June 10, 2026.
