Mystery solved: Steven Spielberg’s new alien invasion movie involves Kansas City
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Trailer confirms Disclosure Day is set at least partly in Kansas City.
- Production filmed in New York and New Jersey while creating Kansas City sets.
- Emily Blunt plays a Kansas City meteorologist whose clicking suggests alien contact.
The first trailer for Steven Spielberg’s newest film “Disclosure Day,” a sci-fi thriller apparently about an alien invasion, finally answers speculation that arose during filming earlier this year.
Now we know that at least some of the action takes place in Kansas City, though filming took place in New York and New Jersey earlier this year, when plot details were guarded like government intel.
Local movie fans — and TV meteorologists — were excited to see Kansas City repped in the trailer. Some are already dreaming of a movie premier here.
“CANT WAIT!!! SPIELBERG AND UFOS!!!!..KANSAS CITY!!!!” one JoCo movie fan wrote on Facebook Tuesday.
“Disclosure Day being set even partially in Kansas City we’ve never been more up,” wrote another.
In May, The Star reported that Spielberg was filming a new movie in places like Cape May County, New Jersey, and that social media photos of the set suggested the action takes place in Kansas City.
The trailer, released Tuesday, opens with this tagline: “If you found out we weren’t alone, if someone showed you, proved it to you, would that frighten you?”
Then Emily Blunt (“Oppenheimer,” “The Devil Wears Prada”) — as a local TV meteorologist — is seen beginning a weather report by saying, “Good morning, Kansas City,” before she begins making weird, disturbing clicking sounds that seem to be some type of alien communication.
That nightmarish sound is bound to go viral.
Universal didn’t release an official synopsis for the film, notes The A.V. Club, though the tagline hints at aliens.
Do they take the shape of deer? There are a lot of them seen in the trailer acting, uh, spooky. There’s a crop circle in a wheat field, too.
Josh O’Connor appears to play some type of whistleblower in trouble with the government. Colin Firth, Eve Hewson and Colman Domingo also star.
“The first trailer for ‘Disclosure Day’ ... isn’t that explicit, but when Emily Blunt’s Kansas City weather forecaster character only produces clicking noises instead of an assessment of the week’s precipitation, it sure sounds pretty extraterrestrial to us,” writes The A.V. Club.
Real Kansas City meteorologists took quick note.
“Hmmm...I wasn’t consulted about this but that would’ve been fun!” FOX 4 meteorologist Joe Lauria joked Tuesday on his Facebook page. “So apparently this is going to be a thing this summer.”
Wes Peery, meteorologist at KSHB 41, noted how the branding of the movie TV station looked similar to that of his workplace.
During filming earlier this year on the campus of the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark, a software engineer on X posted a photo of a building there dressed up like a TV station with fake call letters, KCXE, on the front.
Another picture showed satellite dishes locked behind a fence with this sign: “KCXE 4 Broadcast Operations.”
“Steven Spielberg just casually transforming my campus into Kansas City,” the poster wrote.
A crowd is seen standing outside that building in the trailer.
At that point, industry insiders and Spielberg fans speculated the movie would be another UFO film from the Oscar-winning director of “E.T.” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”
The ties to a fictional Kansas City could not be hidden once filming got underway.
In late February, The Journal News, which covers New York’s Lower Hudson Valley, published a series of photos of the filmmaking underway in White Plains, New York.
Spielberg was seen crouching next to a car kitted out as a Kansas City Police Department car. A KCPD spokesman told The Star at the time that the car did not resemble any of the department’s cruisers.
Another photo showed a Kansas City Royals street sign posted high on a lamppost. It was Royals blue, bore the team’s crown-shaped icon and web address and read: “You’re in Royals country. Get your season tickets now.”
“We can see Steven Spielberg there standing next to a cop car. It says Kansas City on that, by the way. So clearly parts of it are going to take place in Kansas City,” UFO sleuth Patrick Scott Armstrong said on his podcast, “Vetted,” while discussing the film.
“Even though they’re filming in Jersey, they make it seem like Kansas City.”
In March, as Spielberg filmed in Westchester County, New York, a Reddit user reported seeing the local library “dolled up” as the “Jackson County Hospital,” noting that Kansas City is in Jackson County, Missouri.
“I saw the ambulances on set all said Jackson County this morning,” another Reddit user responded.
What made Spielberg use Kansas City, one of Peery’s Facebook followers asked.
“Maybe because our weather is so crazy!” the weather guy responded.
We’ll see.
“Disclosure Day” is bound to bring even more buzz to Kansas City during a busy summer next year. It debuts June 12, right before World Cup matches begin here.
This story was originally published December 17, 2025 at 1:10 PM.
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