Co-writer David Koepp also reveals how he and Steven Spielberg discussed the backstories for the extraterrestrial forces in the film.

Disclosure Day ending explained: Emily Blunt, Colman Domingo, and more break down that ambiguous final line

Co-writer David Koepp also reveals how he and Steven Spielberg discussed the backstories for the extraterrestrial forces in the film.

By Wesley Stenzel

Wesley Stenzel

Wesley Stenzel is a news writer at **. He began writing for EW in 2022.

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June 12, 2026 3:11 p.m. ET

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Emily Blunt in 'Disclosure Day'. Credit:

Niko Tavernise/Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment

- Emily Blunt, Josh O'Connor, Colman Domingo, and David Koepp share their perspectives on the ending of *Disclosure Day*.

- Domingo shares an Easter egg about his character's backstory that you might have missed in the film's final sequence.

- Koepp explains how much backstory he and Steven Spielberg wrote for the aliens in the film.

**This post contains spoilers about *Disclosure Day.***

The ending of *Disclosure Day** *may leave you with more questions than answers, and that's partially by design.

The climax of Steven Spielberg's latest sci-fi thriller sees protagonists Margaret (Emily Blunt) and Daniel (Josh O'Connor) unite with Hugo (Colman Domingo) in a recreation of Margaret's childhood home so she can access her repressed memories of encountering aliens in a UFO as a child.

Once her memory is unlocked, the trio races to Margaret's local news station, where she ordinarily reads the weather reports as a meteorologist, to broadcast Daniel's stolen archive of historical evidence proving countless interactions between humans and aliens across several decades. They're pursued by Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth) and his agents at Wardex, the government contracting company that held all of the secrets to our history with alien visitors.

Emily Blunt, Steven Spielberg, and Wyatt Russell on the set of 'Disclosure Day'.

Niko Tavernise/Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment

After Wardex cuts the power to the news station, Margaret uses a mysterious alien device to restore electricity to the building, which subsequently allows the news team to broadcast a dizzying array of archival footage of aliens and UFOs. The broadcast is quickly picked up by channels around the world, creating a unified global viewing experience as anchors grapple with the shock of alien life being proven beyond a doubt. The news couldn't have come at a more opportune time, as the world is seemingly on the brink of nuclear war for reasons completely unrelated to the alien conspiracies at the heart of the film.

In the film's final moments, Hugo and his associates wheel a living, breathing alien into the news station. The alien whispers a message into Daniel's ear, and he relays it to Margaret, who then begins sharing it with the world on camera: "Listen…"

"Listen" turns out to be the last word of the film, and we don't get to hear Margaret impart any more of the aliens' message, which prompts the question: what more do the extraterrestrial visitors have to say?

Blunt thinks that ambiguity is completely purposeful. "I think that's Steven's intention," she tells **. "The message could actually hold as a singular word, because in many ways, what's been revealed to the world at the end is enough to make you do the thing that I tell you to do at the end. However, I think she also may go on to tell you more of what the message is."

O'Connor concurs. "My interpretation is that 'Listen' is the beginning of a message — that would be my hunch," he says. "But then I also would say that 'Listen' as the word is suffice to tell the entire message. So there's more to be said, but the headline is, 'Hey guys, this is going to be about communication and listening and engaging.'"

Spielberg's co-writer, David Koepp, tells EW that *Disclosure Day* always ended in the newsroom. "It was there for my first draft," he says. "It felt right. I think the mission of the movie is to get the word out and to get the truth out. So we wanted to do that and avoid mission creep. The mission of the movie wasn't, 'Can the aliens dance?' The mission is, 'Did the word get out?' So that was where we felt the line was."

Colman Domingo in 'Disclosure Day'.

Niko Tavernise/Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment

Domingo says that the final sequence was filmed at the tail end of production, which he thinks was a conscious choice by Spielberg. "I can tell that Steven wanted to hold off on that, to make sure that we had the story underneath us organically to receive it in an extraordinary way," he says. "It's funny — it really was as special as it appears."

The *Euphoria* actor says that interacting with the alien character, codenamed "In Vivo," took his breath away.

"When we were finally meeting In Vivo, there was awe," he says. "The mechanics of it and how it operated and all that — we were just in awe of it. It was practical. That was not CGI. That was practical. Even sitting him up and all that, because it's all mechanical. But that's the beautiful thing about Steven that I remember from *Lincoln*. He likes the* real* of it. He wants to make it real, every little detail. I'm sure in *The Fabelmans*, there were things in the drawers of the house and things you can touch and feel. So I think that with practical effects, he really makes room for that."

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In Domingo's understanding of the character, Hugo has direct contact with In Vivo. "There is a little bit of an Easter egg in our film: if people watch closely, you can see there's a moment that we filmed when Hugo is putting his head up against a white curtain, up against the silhouette of In Vivo," he explains, noting that the moment occurs during the barrage of archival footage during the finale. "And the way they communicated was touching head-to-head or hand-to-hand and downloading information."

He continues, "So Hugo knows a lot. There's a lot happening in that moment, but I saw it, and then Steven reconfirmed to me that that is in there. He says that's for the ones that'll watch the movie two or three times."

A hidden world

Josh O'Connor in 'Disclosure Day'.

Niko Tavernise/Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment

Domingo also says that Spielberg filled him in on some details about the aliens' backstory that we don't learn directly from *Disclosure Day*.

"In my conversations with Steven, we did talk about how many different species there are," he says. "There wouldn't just be one. So when we eventually showed the non-humans, some are smaller, some are taller, some have long limbs. They come from different places, which is very exciting. And the idea that Hugo has been able to download from all of them and try to get to understand them."

The film reveals very little about where its various aliens come from, or what their histories and motivations are. Koepp, however, says that he and Spielberg had "fairly in-depth" conversations about the nitty-gritty of the aliens' backstories and worlds as they crafted the screenplay.

"You've got to have answers for all that," he says. "And it's not stuff you want to share with the audience, because it ruins the fun of something that has mystery and wonderment. That's the motor. Don't f--- with the motor."

Koepp says that he and the *Jaws* director were comfortable leaving most of the film's questions unanswered. "Creating a whole taxonomy of another planet wasn't possible, in part because we were trying to respect the fact that there's a lot we just won't understand or be able to understand," he says.

The *Jurassic Park* screenwriter notes that aliens, both real and fictional, might exist entirely outside of the bounds of human comprehension. "People say, 'Well, there'd be decent photography of these flying saucers,'" he says. "And you say, 'Well, what if they're not flying saucers? What if we can't perceive them? We can only see visually between 400 and 800 Angstroms and we can only hear certain things. Our dogs hear more than we do.'"

He continues, "In the last couple hundred years, we started inventing devices that can perceive other things that we can't perceive, but it's still crude. We don't know their form. We don't know where they are or how they are, and we may not be able to know. So we tried to respect them."

What do they want?

Emily Blunt in 'Disclosure Day'.

Niko Tavernise/Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment

Blunt wasn't particularly privy to the backstories that Spielberg and Koepp cooked up for the aliens, but she had a general understanding of the extraterrestrials' motivations.

"In a lot of these movies, the aliens are coming to kill, they're coming to destroy, as per my husband's *Quiet Place* movies," she says, laughing. "In this case, they're not coming to destroy."

The actress says that she and Spielberg discussed the logic of what an advanced off-world civilization might want to do with humanity.

"Because they are clearly so much more technologically advanced — so advanced that they can travel across galaxies to our own — I think we talked a lot about how if they did arrive here, why haven't they wanted a piece of us?" she says. "Maybe it's because the Earth is so beneath them that they don't need anything. We've talked about the ideas of warning and protection — there's so many amazing stories of people who have experienced things like right near a nuclear power plant. It's just really quite fascinating. Some of the experiences seem to be a way of protecting us and a way of ensuring that we don't wipe ourselves out."

O'Connor was also fascinated by the real-life hypotheses that aliens want to prevent humanity from annihilating itself with nuclear weapons. "If there was ever a reason to come down and check out what the hell's going on, it might be a galaxy-shifting new bomb," he says. "They might be more advanced in being able to travel through galaxies and universes, but we might be more advanced in weaponry. We might be the only life form that is interested in hate. And so if there was ever a reason to come down and go, why are they doing that to each other?"

The *Challengers *star suggests that Daniel shared similar theories about the aliens' intentions in *Disclosure Day*. "There's plenty of reasons why they might come down and why they might feel that they could help us," he says. "Those are things that maybe Daniel thought a little bit about in the same way as I."

However, O'Connor intentionally left himself in the dark when it came to the aliens' lore. "I'm sure Steven and David would've been willing to discuss that if I'd asked," he says. "But, in the same way as I would with any other film, the way I work is that me, Josh, never knows more than the character knows. So I try and stick by that rule."

What does it all mean?

Josh O'Connor in 'Disclosure Day'.

Niko Tavernise/Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment

Spielberg says that *Disclosure Day* began with a thesis, first and foremost. "I had a message. I started with something I wanted to say," he explains. "It's always nice when you have a story to tell, and you also have something to say. And so I knew what I wanted to say with this, and that guided me as I went back and figured out, now what do I have to do to eventually send out this message? And so that kind of was my guiding light."

But what, exactly, is that message?

"I think Steven himself would say that there's a number of meanings to the end of this film, and hopefully an audience will have their own feelings and theories and be able to reflect it to their own lives and their own experiences in whichever way they like," O'Connor says before explaining that he's more intrigued by the human side of every sci-fi story. "My fundamental interest is: how do you relate these stories to us and to where we are at in the world?"

The *Mastermind* actor thinks the film holds a sociopolitical relevance, as Wardex's mistreatment of the aliens that it holds in captivity can easily be viewed as a metaphor for real-life groups being targeted. "In the U.K. and America and across Europe, we're in a time of change where immigrants and others are being scapegoated, in my opinion," he says. "Often there's a real lack of understanding or a lack of humanity engaging with people, really listening to communities and individuals. And to me, that's what the ending's about."

He adds, "Yes, okay, we're exposing the truth, we're telling the world, and all those beautiful philosophical questions about 'If aliens, what about God? If aliens, what about our response to each other? What does that mean for us? What does that mean for the planet Earth?' All those philosophical questions are great ones, but also, what about each other? And I think that to me, that's what the message of the film is, is what it is, which is to listen and to engage."

*Disclosure Day* is now playing in theaters.

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