Sadly, Steven Spielberg’s “Disclosure Day” is a money loser for Universal, as it needed $300M to break even and is currently at $239M, with not much more left to add to that tally, as it only made $1M this past weekend.
This underperformance has now culminated in “Disclosure Day” being shipped off to VOD next week, on July 21, which means it will have had a 38-day exclusive theatrical run. Not the most robust of rollouts, but Universal will now hope to recoup the budget through digital sales.
What went wrong? Word of mouth, mostly. The film actually received mostly positive reviews — 80% on RT and 74 on MC — but audiences just didn’t like “Disclosure Day” all that much, which resulted in its second weekend taking a 65% nosedive. The issues weren’t Spielberg’s direction, which was efficient, but rather David Koepp’s clunky screenplay.
So, what’s next for Spielberg? That’s three straight films plagued by financial losses. “West Side Story” cost $100M, while “The Fabelmans” only cost $40M. He wants to next make a western, which would be wonderful, but the days when his name alone was a prominent box office draw might be coming to an end. It’ll be interesting to see what kind of budget he can secure for his next film.
Festival press conferences have turned into landmines of political questioning, to the point where some artists would probably prefer to turn down being a juror at Cannes, Venice, or Berlin.