Steven Spielberg fans are charging back to theaters around the world to see his latest sci-fi blockbuster, Disclosure Day, which features some big stars like Emily Blunt and Colman Domingo. The film opened in theaters last weekend, grossing only $90 million during its first few days at the box office, but it has a long way to go considering it carries a $165 million budget. Spielberg has been on a bit of a hiatus from the sci-fi genre, with his last two feature films — West Side Story and The Fabelmans — going in a much different direction. Spielberg is known as one of the directors that both revolutionized the sci-fi genre and made it relevant, and although he’s now almost 80 years old, it appears he still has a few more films left in him.
Spielberg’s last sci-fi movie before the release of Disclosure Day was Ready Player One, which took itself much less seriously than his new alien invasion thriller. Make no mistake: this isn’t an insult — Ready Player One is, without question, one of the most fun movies Steven Spielberg has ever directed, even if it isn’t without its flaws. Eight years removed from the worldwide premiere of Ready Player One, the film is now streaming on HBO Max in America, and it’s also quietly become one of the top 10 most-watched titles on VOD platforms around the world such as Prime Video and Apple TV. Spielberg recruited Tye Sheridan and Olivia Cooke to star in Ready Player One, along with Ben Mendelsohn and T.J. Miller. Cooke is now best known for her role as Alicent Hightower in the HBO original fantasy series, House of the Dragon.
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Collider Exclusive · Oscar Best Picture Quiz Which Oscar Best Picture Is Your Perfect Movie? Parasite · Everything Everywhere · Oppenheimer · Birdman · No Country
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Five Oscar Best Picture winners. Five completely different visions of what cinema can be — and what it can do to you. One of them is the film that was made for the way your mind works. Ten questions will figure out which one.
🪜Parasite
🌀Everything Everywhere
☢️Oppenheimer
🐦Birdman
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🪙No Country for Old Men
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01
What kind of film experience do you actually want? The best movies don’t just entertain — they leave something behind.
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02
Which idea grabs you most in a film? Great films are driven by a central obsession. What’s yours?
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03
How do you like your story told? Form is content. The way a story is shaped changes what it means.
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04
What makes a truly great antagonist? The opposition defines the protagonist. What kind of opposition fascinates you?
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05
What do you want from a film’s ending? The final note is the one that lingers. What do you want it to sound like?
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06
Which setting pulls you in most? Where a film takes place shapes everything — mood, stakes, what’s even possible.
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07
What cinematic craft impresses you most? Every great film has a signature — a technical or artistic element that makes it unmistakable.
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08
What kind of main character do you root for? The protagonist is the lens. Who you choose to follow says something about you.
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09
How do you feel about a film that takes its time? Pace is a choice. Some films sprint; others let tension accumulate slowly, deliberately.
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10
What do you want to feel walking out of the cinema? The best films leave a mark. What kind of mark do you want?
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The Academy Has Decided Your Perfect Film Is…
Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.
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Parasite
You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.
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Everything Everywhere All at Once
You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.
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Oppenheimer
You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.
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Birdman
You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.
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No Country for Old Men
You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.
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What Is ‘Ready Player One’ About?
A condensed synopsis for Ready Player One, which also stars Mark Rylance, reads as follows:
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“In 2045, the real world is a bleak wasteland, and most of humanity escapes into the OASIS — a vast virtual universe. When its visionary creator dies, he leaves behind a series of hidden challenges, and teenager Wade Watts joins a global race to find the ultimate Easter egg that grants total control of the OASIS.”
One of the aspects of Ready Player One that was criticized the most was the intense amount of pop-culture references. Parts of the film felt like Space Jam 2, where it was more of an advertisement for other Warner Bros. properties than anything else.
Check out Ready Player One on HBO Max and stay tuned to Collider for more updates and coverage of Disclosure Day, Steven Spielberg’s new sci-fi movie.
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