It's a weird facet of Hollywood that movies are often given release dates before other important milestones have been reached, like the movies being finished, or the movies being named, or sometimes the movies having even been written. I get it—big studios want to lock down that release date real estate before someone else grabs it—but it's still strange to announce a date when people will be able to go see a movie, then turn to the production team and say, "OK, so… what's our movie gonna be about?"
Case in point: Steven Spielberg's upcoming film has a cast that includes Emily Blunt and Colin Firth, but apparently still doesn't have a name—IMDB calls it "Untitled Steven Spielberg Amblin Universal Event Film." Catchy! It does, however, have a release date. According to Variety, it's coming out on June 12, 2026, which is a move from its original release date of May 15, 2026.
How about a plot. Does it have a plot? Variety says the film is "reportedly UFO-related," and it's being written by David Koepp, who also wrote War of the Worlds and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull for Spielberg. I'm not sure if that's a good sign: both of those movies had UFO stuff in them, it just wasn't very good UFO stuff. Hopefully it'll be more like Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, both of which had extremely good UFO stuff in them.
Why am I even writing about this? Well, Spielberg has always had ties to gaming, contributing to the design of LucasArts adventure game The Dig in the '90s and creating Medal of Honor with Electronic Arts in the 2000s. It's not all good stuff, though: he made a pretty bad game called Steven Spielberg's Director's Chair in 1996, plus he directed Ready Player One in 2018. That had some UFO business in it, too—Unwatchable Film Offenses. Yes! Gottem.
Hopefully a UFO-related project means Spielberg is returning to blockbuster popcorn movies instead of the heavier dramas he's mostly been doing lately. Nothing against The Fabelmens (which I didn't see) but I don't want to watch a Spielberg movie about making movies, I want to watch a Spielberg movie about flying saucers. Pew pew!
