The basics:

• Spielberg’ ‘Disclosure Day‘ filmed in six New Jersey counties
• Production spent more than $34 million in the state
• NJIT played a key role as a TV news studio
• Cape May Seashore Lines hosted major train scenes

A young Steven Spielberg looked to the summer sky in New Jersey, eager to glimpse the Perseid meteor shower with his father. In such unending vastness, was anyone else out there? If they were, did they know about us? And did we already know about them? The acclaimed director has been enthralled by the possibilities of the cosmos ever since.

First came “Firelight,” the 1964 UFO movie Spielberg made as a teen. Later, he brought his fascination with contacting alien life to the big screen, and how. “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (1977) illuminated the magic and wonder of making such a profound connection in grand fashion while “E.T. the Extraterrestrial” (1982) hit at the tender, emotional heart of shared existence and the fragility of life and friendship, both alien and human. “War of the Worlds” (2005), Spielberg’s take on H.G. Wells, depicted the terror of an alien invasion carried out by fearsome, hulking Tripods in New Jersey and beyond.

For his next alien story, he returned to Jersey, the source of his own first contact with an enduring curiosity that would propel his filmmaking.

Fast forward to present day

“Disclosure Day,” an original story conceived by Spielberg, is a product of his rekindled interest in the subject, given a 2017 New York Times article on what the Pentagon knows about UFOs and related congressional hearings in 2023. Familiar themes of the film include a longstanding government coverup and the fight to expose the truth about what are now called UAPs, or Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena. Part sci-fi action thriller, part exploration of the ramifications of disclosing alien life to the people of the world, the movie, released June 12 and available via video on demand July 21, also takes on questions of faith.

Stars Josh O’Connor and Emily Blunt play rogue cybersecurity expert Daniel Kellner and the rapidly transforming broadcast meteorologist Margaret Fairchild. The duo, who seem to share an otherworldly connection, find each other on a quest to illuminate the reality of what the government knows about extraterrestrial life. They are joined by an ensemble cast that includes Eve Hewson, Colman Domingo, Colin Firth and Wyatt Russell in a story that takes place in Maryland, West Virginia and Kansas City, Mo.

New Jersey, with its diverse range of landscapes, plays all three locations, though the movie also filmed in New York. Production for “Disclosure Day” spanned Atlantic, Cape May, Essex, Hudson, Middlesex and Morris counties, from Woodbine to Woodbridge.

Spielberg’s Jersey roots

A bountiful spread of Jersey sites in the movie serves as a fitting tribute to Spielberg’s creative roots.

The director, now 79, spent part of his early childhood living in Haddon Township with his family. His semi-autobiographical movie “The Fabelmans” (2022) shows how he was moved to make amateur films after seeing his first movie, Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Greatest Show on Earth” (1952), at the Westmont Theatre in his New Jersey hometown. Slightly traumatized by a train crash in the film, he later sought to recreate the scene with his train set and film his own version.

In “Disclosure Day,” Daniel and Margaret find themselves in peril as their car is dragged by a freight train. While some of the action took place on soundstages at Steiner Studios in Brooklyn, the scene was also filmed on the Cape May Seashore Lines.

Finding the right site

Location manager Katherine Delaney worked on the search for the movie’s many New Jersey sites. “That was a really tough location for a number of reasons,” she says of the train scene.

“The majority of train lines that are immediately around the New York area are functional, they have trains moving on them all the time,” Delaney says. “That particular location was so specifically scripted … The intersection had to look a certain way, and then there is a long run of tracks where we needed to be parallel with a street that they could kind of get up high speed and drive, so that you could see the cars driving and shooting along, shooting at the train station, driving along the road.

“So, it was a tough one to find, and we certainly looked at many, many places, but in terms of the tracks being the right thing for the script, Cape May Seashore Lines (which is not a commuter line) really laid itself out beautifully that way. And then, of course, it all has to kind of come together magically. We were so fortunate that those trains went through multiple towns, so we had to engage Upper Township and we had to engage Tuckahoe and Vineland and the Milmay section of Buena Vista, and everybody was just so supportive, and everybody was just so kind.”

Leaning on ‘a real track man’

For the scene, Delaney immersed herself in the intricacies of the train lines with the help of a South Jersey source versed in the rails. “Tony Macrie, who runs the Cape May Seashore Line, is a real track man,” she says. “He loves trains, he understands the tracks of it all, and I think when I first approached him, he was definitely a little hesitant. He’s in the train business, he’s not in the movie business. But he really opened himself up to the experience. It was a high learning curve for all of us. We became train experts.”

Macrie, president and general manager of Cape May Seashore Lines, started the railroad company 30 years ago. He’s been working in the rail transportation industry for nearly 50, and while he’s had some encounters with commercials, this was his first time hosting a feature film. He says the “Disclosure Day” experience was “in a word, spectacular.”

Delaney first reached out to him in early 2024 about using the railroad in the Spielberg film, then visited his office with storyboards for the train scenes. “There was no downside to it,” he says. “I said sure, sounds great for Steven Spielberg, great for New Jersey, great for the counties where the movie was filmed. I said we’re very proud and privileged to be a part of this.”

In the fall of 2024, Spielberg himself visited. “We were equally happy to meet each other,” Macrie says, pointing out the director’s history of being a rail fan since he was a young child. “Our passion for trains, both Steven and I, it began at an early age.” Spielberg has showcased plenty of train scenes in his films, starting with “Duel,” his 1971 feature debut. “We did share a couple real quick conversations in the cab of one of our locomotives,” Macrie says of the Hollywood giant, who suggested they take a picture together. “It was great, he walked in and he was just the guy next door. He said ‘I really love this. This reminds me of my childhood.’”

Spielberg returned to film scenes at Cape May Seashore Lines for a little more than a month, from February through March of 2025. For the purposes of the movie, signage was posted for “Missouri Light Rail.”

“We worked with the script people — every morning we’d have phone calls. It was great, it was like a movie!” Macrie says with a laugh. “We would do it again in a heartbeat, no doubt about it.”

He remembers watching the train drag the car down the track in person. But when he saw the finished scene at an advanced screening in early June, it sparkled with an extra gloss of movie magic. “Wow,” he thought. “Did we really do that?”

A boon to NJ’s economy

Delaney, a New Jersey native, grew up in Summit. “My family had an HVAC construction company in Mountainside for about 50 years, so I have generations of Jersey in my blood,” the location manager says. “It was a lot of fun scouting around Jersey in general, it always is.”

She previously worked with Spielberg on Garden State production for the movie-musical “West Side Story” (2021) in Paterson and Newark. Her other Jersey-filmed credits include Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman” (2019) and Steven Soderbergh’s unconventional ghost movie “Presence” (2024), written by “Disclosure Day” screenwriter David Koepp, who also collaborated with Spielberg on “Jurassic Park” and “War of the Worlds” (the latter, set in and filmed in New Jersey).

“Disclosure Day” spent 23 days filming in the state between February and May 2025, from the Cape May region to Jersey City and Newark. The Universal Pictures movie from Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment spent more than $34 million in New Jersey and received a $12 million tax credit, per the state Economic Development Authority. So far, the film has grossed more than $220 million worldwide.

Watch the official ‘Disclosure Day’ trailer, courtesy of Universal Pictures:

The perfect TV studio

Another challenge of the locations hunt was finding a place that could believably play a TV news studio — a news studio that serves an important function in the movie. The production needed a base of operations for KCXE, the Kansas City station where Blunt’s character, Margaret, works. It’s also the place where she has quite the alien “intervention” when she’s on air, spontaneously delivering a series of clicks in an unknown language to the viewing audience.

Enter the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Delaney and her colleagues found the Newark university to be just what they needed.

“The original plan was to build KCXE on a stage and have it be a stage set,” Delaney says. “We spent a lot of time looking around for the right exterior, and we had one of our amazing scouts, Zoran [Blazevic], [who] found the exterior of the NJIT building that we use. And I think when our very brilliant production designer Adam Stockhausen saw it, he thought … the thing that makes the building really special, not just the exterior, but they had this beautiful event space inside the building, and it kind of gave you that ‘Good Morning America’ vibe, where you could see what’s going on inside and outside, and so much (of) the final scenes of people being outside, being able to look in, standing there with their phones, was really, really crucial to the plot. So, it was such a huge find for us.”

She shares these behind-the-scenes details during a break from another production — the horror movie “A Quiet Place Part III,” which also stars Oscar winner Emily Blunt and is due out in the summer of 2027. That movie, directed by Blunt’s husband, John Krasinski, has filmed in New Jersey spots including Camden.

“Disclosure Day” ended up using NJIT for both the exterior and interior of KCXE, where art director Deborah Wheatley assembled a whole TV studio with real-life touches like a control room and teleprompter. Spielberg wanted the space to look like a real broadcast setup with nearly full functionality.

“Authenticity is very important to him,” Delaney says. “He’s got an incredible production designer, incredible costume designers. Making sure that everything really has a through line and looks connected and part of the same vision is so important. Working with him is just this incredible wealth of knowledge and experience, and he’s seen it and done it at such a high level for such a long time. It really is kind of a masterclass getting to be on a team with him. I mean, his knowledge just feels endless.”

A major stunt

Another key location in “Disclosure Day” is a run-down West Virginia safe house.

It’s the place where Daniel (O’Connor) and his girlfriend Jane Blankenship (Hewson) briefly find refuge as they’re being hunted by government agents. The production built a farmhouse with a wraparound porch at Fosterfields Living Historical Farm in Morris Township.

“We looked for weeks and weeks and weeks for this house,” Delaney says. Production designer Stockhausen and the team needed a home where they could set the stage for an explosive action scene. Slight spoiler: that scene involves a stunt where a car bursts through the house during a dramatic chase.

“The house and the stunts were very much designed around this brilliant ‘oner,’ this shot that the director had envisioned in his mind, so while certain elements of one house would work, maybe the topography doesn’t work, or maybe the topography was great, but the house wasn’t set quite right for how we were going to need to be able to do the stunt,” Delaney says.

It took six to seven weeks to build the farmhouse, followed by a period of stunt rehearsal, for a total of three months at the site, she says. “You do get one shot for that initial hit, and it’s got to be right.”

“Fosterfields was just game and they showed up, and they were so incredibly supportive, and I hope they’re so proud, because it just absolutely looks amazing,” Delaney says.

Since it’s a small Jersey world on film sets these days, given the resurgence in local production over the last few years, Emmy winner O’Connor was no stranger to the area. The actor – Blunt’s fellow Brit – previously filmed “The History of Sound,” his 2025 period film with Paul Mescal, in Morris County. Locations there and elsewhere in Jersey subbed in for Maine, Massachusetts, Kentucky and England.

The convent

“Disclosure Day” also filmed at the Community of St. John Baptist in Morris County. The Mendham Township grounds, home to Tudor Revival and English Manor-style buildings, belong to a religious order of women in the Episcopal Church. The site plays a convent where former novitiate Jane takes Daniel and greets her mentor, Sister Maura (Elizabeth Marvel).

“It’s such a stunning property,” Delaney says. “The buildings on it are just perfect and gorgeous and they look so great on film. Our incredible location scout, Aaron Hurvitz, had found that location … They had not done anything to that scale before, of weeks of prepping and lighting and days of filming. I would say Sister Monica, in particular, was our incredible advocate, but all of the sisters were just so fun and lovely. And I think it was special for us to be there and have them host us, and they were tremendous hosts.

We got very lucky on this movie, just dealing with absolutely wonderful people who opened up their homes and communities to us for this.
– Katherine Delaney, location manager, ‘Disclosure Day’

“We got very lucky on this movie, just dealing with absolutely wonderful people who opened up their homes and communities to us for this. The sisters in particular really loved our catering that would make cookies every day, and I think they really loved the cookies. They thought that the craft service was lovely, and they could go get themselves a cup of tea and chat with the crew. They got a kick out of having us there, and then they went back to their more normal regimented schedule after we left.”

Rolling out the red carpet

A series of scenes communicate the massive sweep of what’s at stake in “Disclosure Day.”

They seek to illustrate the wide reach of the revelatory videos and photos Daniel and Margaret are trying to share with the world. Such scenes involve “vignettes of people looking at their phones, so you’ll see people on buses and on trains and in the airport,” Delaney says. “Jersey City really rolled out the red carpet for us for some of those scenes. We were shooting all over, running around all over Jersey City.”

Firehouse Studios, a photography and event space housed in a former firehouse downtown on Mercer Street, was used for the exterior of Margaret’s home. (It was previously the filming location for MTV’s “Jersey Shore” spinoff “Snooki & JWoww.”) More Jersey City filming included Montgomery Street and Bergen Avenue and Cornelison Avenue and Bright Street. The movie’s decommissioned airfield was filmed in the Whippany section of Hanover Township, and store scenes were filmed at Dick’s Sporting Goods at Woodbridge Center.

A chance sighting in Montville led Delaney to a “really special” Exxon station (on Main Road), which fit one memorable scene’s specifications to a T.

“I always wonder if people think we’re putting them on or something when somebody walks in and says, ‘Hi, would you like to have your business in a movie?'” Delaney says.

“Disclosure Day” also made a stop in Cumberland County, near 5 Points Custard in Vineland, for a scene where the characters encounter a curious-looking fox, one of several animals given a kind of storybook glow in the film.

“We’re very lucky that we got to find some of these smaller gems that were connected to the larger sequence pieces,” Delaney says. “I think in New Jersey, you can throw a stone and find a great location.”