Fictionalized Kansas City at heart of Spielberg’s new ET movie, ‘Disclosure Day’
(Editor’s note: There are spoilers ahead.)
If you live in Kansas City, if you know Kansas City at all, you might be tempted to spend too much time trying to figure out if those are real Kansas City streets, buildings, cop cars, city buses and fire engines in Steven Spielberg’s new summer blockbuster, “Disclosure Day.”
Because pivotal moments in this movie about whether extraterrestrial life has ever visited planet Earth take place in and around Kansas City.
It’s a Hollywood Kansas City since the movie, which opens Friday, was filmed elsewhere.
But references to our fair city are abundant and frequent and Kansas Citians will notice them, especially in the climactic, emotional minutes when I swear everyone in the Olathe movie theater where I saw the movie Monday night held their breath. And maybe they cried.
OK, that was me crying. (The last few minutes of the movie give a glorious, visual shoutout to Kansas City’s beautiful skyline, with an image of Union Station front and center.)
Emily Blunt, who just waltzed across movie screens in couture in “The Devil Wears Prada 2,” is the heart of the movie as Kansas City weather gal Margaret Fairchild. (Did they have to dress her here so plain Jane in too-short jeans, dark socks and generic white sneakers? We do better than that in KC.)
After an odd interaction at the outset with a cardinal who flies through a window into her apartment, Fairchild suddenly is able to put herself in other people’s shoes, read other people’s thoughts — and to speak in an odd, freaky, clicking noise, which she does on air.
Imagine if KMBC’s Bryan Busy, reporting on tornadoes in the Kansas City area, started making non-human sounds.
You’d freak out.
And you should.
Only one person can understand what Fairchild is saying. He happens to be cybersecurity expert turned whistleblower Daniel Kellner, played by English actor Josh O’Connor who won an Emmy for his role as Prince Charles in Netflix’s “The Crown.”
Ellner has the proof that his employer has been keeping secrets for the government for more than 70 years — close encounters of the third kind on Earth are real.
The movie ponders this: Would it be good or bad if we knew that extraterrestrials really exist?
Ellner’s girlfriend and former nun-in-training Jane Blankenship (Irish actress Eve Hewson, daughter of U2 frontman Bono) worries that if people are given proof that “supreme beings” exist in the form of extraterrestrials, will they stop believing in another supreme deity, God?
Spielberg has said in interviews for this new film that he “absolutely” believes aliens have been here, and are here.”
“The movie takes the position of the believers, or the curious, the ones that have been deeply affected by this,” he said on “CBS Sunday Morning” over the weekend.
“The Emily Blunt character, you know, something has happened to her. She has no idea what it is. She has to try to understand why this has upended her life.
“And the movie also takes the position of the church. What does this do to the fundamental beliefs that many of us have? Is God our God only on this planet? Or is God a god for every system where there’s civilization and intelligent life, and even developing life?”
Spielberg calls this a “chase movie.” Ellner steals evidence that aliens have visited Earth from his employer, Wardex, which has been hiding the secret for the government.
Ellner’s boss — the movie’s bad guy — is played by British actor Colin Firth. He and his henchmen try to stop Ellner from spilling these explosive beans. The ensuing chase from the D.C. area to Kansas City includes a nail-biting car vs. train scene.
“’Disclosure Day’ is about how, if somebody had the power and if somebody had possession of the entire archive of visual evidence of what’s been happening for the last 80 years, what would happen if they decided to do a data dump across the entire world all at once?” Spielberg told CBS.
“And the people who are trying to stop that data dump from happening, that is basically the core of this chase movie.”
Ellner gets help along the way from his former Wardex colleague and fellow defector Hugo Wakefield, played by “Euphoria” Emmy winner Colman Domingo.
We caught the first whiff that at least some of the movie would take place in Kansas City in late February 2025.
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. Basically, it wasn’t theirs.
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.”
Fairchild makes a dramatic escape from said hospital after the bad guys from Wardex find her there after she undergoes an MRI following the weird clicking-in-tongues incident.
In May 2025, fans and paparazzi posted more photos taken of the filming in New York and New Jersey.
The TV station — KCXE, where Blunt’s character works in Kansas City — is actually a building on the campus of the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark, New Jersey.
The first trailer released in December confirmed that Kansas City would be depicted in the action.
“I can’t speak for the entire audience, but there are certain things that unite us,” Spielberg said in his CBS interview. “And one of the things that unites us, one of the places we can find common ground, is our united belief that the extraordinary is possible, and the impossible is possible.
“And I think UAP, UFO, the whole phenomenon is something that everybody across any spectrum — culturally, politically — can agree on.”
If the reaction of the Kansas City audience I watched “Disclosure Day” with is an accurate barometer, we don’t want to be alone here.
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