In Steven Spielberg’s new film Disclosure Day, two nuns argue about whether God made aliens. It’s the latest sign that something is shifting in the way Hollywood thinks about faith — and it goes a lot deeper than prestige Bible content.
The setup is a government conspiracy thriller — aliens have been living in federal custody for 80 years, and the people running the cover-up did it because they genuinely believed humanity couldn’t handle the truth. Not just psychologically. Spiritually. They were afraid people would worship the aliens, or that the aliens’ existence would destroy whatever faith they had left. Eve Hewson plays a former nun who thinks they were right: “People will see them as deities. They’ll stop believing in God.” Another nun disagrees: “Why would God make such a vast universe, yet save it only for us?”
This is what’s happening in a Spielberg blockbuster in 2026. And the remarkable thing isn’t that faith is in the film — it’s how it’s in the film.
Spielberg is Jewish, and if you follow his filmography closely you know faith has never been far from it. Raiders is essentially a movie about the power of the God of Israel, it just doesn’t say so out loud. Schindler’s List says it loudly. The Fabelmans says it personally. But in all of those films Spielberg came in with a point of view. Something to argue. Disclosure Day is the first time he seems to be making the film because he genuinely doesn’t know the answer — using the movie itself to work something out. He’s not delivering a position on faith. He’s sitting with a question he can’t resolve.
And here’s why that matters. Hollywood has always had a complicated relationship with religion — treating it as either harmless inspiration or a useful villain, rarely anything in between. Genuine engagement with faith, the kind that doesn’t condescend and doesn’t pander, has mostly been left to explicitly Christian filmmakers working outside the mainstream. The idea that a major studio blockbuster from one of the most commercially reliable directors alive would plant itself inside an unresolved theological argument and just… stay there — that’s new. Or at least it was, until you start looking around and realize Spielberg isn’t the only one doing it.
Rian Johnson released Wake Up Dead Man in December and it landed differently than expected. The third Benoit Blanc mystery shouldn’t work as a film about faith — a murder mystery is maybe the least likely container for genuine theological wrestling — but Johnson makes it work because he’s not doing it academically. He grew up very seriously Christian. Not in a vague cultural sense. Christ was the actual lens through which he understood the world, from childhood through his early twenties. He left. And he’s spent years being honest with himself about the fact that leaving didn’t resolve anything.
“As anyone who was a believer at some point in their life tells you, it never goes away,” Johnson said. “It’s always there in some form.”
What brought him back to these questions for this film was pretty simple: he was exhausted by the way everything feels right now. The pre-sorted hostility of it. Every conversation already a fight before it starts. He kept finding himself drawn back to the stuff his faith taught him that cut against that — loving people who make it hard, releasing grievance instead of hoarding it. He just noticed those instincts were the only ones that gave him any relief.
“My hope is that people will have a conversation about faith coming out of it,” Johnson said. “Not that they learn a lesson, but that they come out talking with the people around them about their experience.”
Johnson didn’t plan the film around a cultural moment. But what he was feeling — that secular life keeps running up against questions it can’t answer on its own — turns out to be exactly what several of the most interesting filmmakers working right now are feeling too. Which is how you end up with Ryan Coogler, who last spring released Sinners, a horror film set in 1932 Mississippi, and discovered partway through that you couldn’t be honest about that time and place without faith at the center of it. Black Christian tradition, hoodoo, the anguish of looking for God inside a world that looks like Jim Crow — it’s not decoration in that film. The horror only lands because the spiritual stakes are real.
So you have a Jewish director making a sci-fi blockbuster about whether God exists in a universe with aliens, a lapsed Christian making a murder mystery about what faith costs and what it gives, and a filmmaker steeped in Black culture making a horror film about what happens when religion is the only thing standing between a community and annihilation. Three completely different films, three directors who wouldn’t describe themselves as making faith content — and all of them ended up in the same place.
That’s not a coincidence. It’s a sign.
The obvious story about faith and entertainment right now is the rise of explicitly Christian content — The Chosen, The King of Kings, the whole ecosystem of films made by believers for believers. And that story is real. But it’s a different story from this one. Those films exist to affirm what their audience already believes. These films exist because their directors hit a wall. They were trying to say something true about the universe, or the country, or what people do when history goes wrong — and the secular vocabulary kept falling short.
“Everybody has a personal perspective on faith,” Johnson said. “And I find people want to talk.”
Hollywood has spent decades looking for answers everywhere else — in technology, in politics, in the relentless churn of culture. Now, almost without meaning to, it keeps arriving at the same door.
