Steven Spielberg made 2026's biggest disappointment, according to Letterboxd users
The film beat its projections in June, and lost the long game anyway.
The question in r/Letterboxd's thread was simple: which 2026 release was the biggest letdown for you? The runaway leader isn't Supergirl, which trails in second, ahead of The Mandalorian and Grogu and Scream 7. It's Disclosure Day — Steven Spielberg's UFO event movie, his first original story since The Fabelmans.
The top answer doesn't bother with hedging:
"Disclosure Day. What a load of boring, nonsensical bullshit."
— r/Letterboxd commenter (27 upvotes)
The numbers behind the vote
Calling it 2026's biggest flop would be wrong, and that's what makes the thread interesting. The film opened at No. 1 on June 12 with $44 million domestic and $93 million worldwide — the biggest debut an original Spielberg/Amblin film has ever had. Critics were fine with it: 80 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, 74 on Metacritic.
Audiences were the problem. The film earned a B CinemaScore — soft for a Spielberg summer movie — dropped 61 percent in weekend two, and finished around $241 million worldwide against a $115 million budget and roughly $80 million in marketing. It went to VOD after 39 days and reached Peacock on October 9.
That last date explains the timing of the vote. The thread took off twelve days after the Peacock debut — the moment everyone who skipped the theater finally watched the thing and came back with opinions.
Disclosure Day hit Peacock on October 9. The "biggest letdown of 2026" thread arrived twelve days later.
What people say they wanted
The thread's complaints are specific: an Emily Blunt-led cast (with Josh O'Connor, Colin Firth, Colman Domingo) and a David Koepp script that promised Close Encounters for the disclosure era, delivering instead what the top comment calls nonsense. The production didn't help its own mythology — Blunt publicly said she was told AI would enhance her alien vocalizations, and Spielberg denied it, insisting he "would never have used AI."
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Second place gets the same treatment from a different direction. The thread's most-upvoted Supergirl comment mourns the lead rather than the film:
"The real tragedy is watching a Milly Alcock performance get absolutely sandbagged by a script that reads like it was aggressively generated by a committee of corporate synergy Executives."
— r/Letterboxd commenter (89 upvotes)
A voted list like this measures expectation against delivery, not box office against budget — which is why a profitable, decently reviewed Spielberg film can top it while genuine bombs go unmentioned. By that measure, the thread's verdict on 2026 is consistent: the year's deepest disappointments came from the names that promised the most.
Previously we wrote: Clayface is flopping overseas before reviews are even out. The US is its last chance