John Williams returns for more Williams-Spielberg magic! This time in a UFO movie.

John Williams is one of the most honored people on earth. He’s scored over 150 movies, plus many, many television episodes, concert works, and special events, like the Olympics. His most recent project was a world premiere of a concert work in Vienna this October 26 (title: When the World Was Waltzing). His last movie was Indiana Jones And The Dial of Destiny. So people might be forgiven for thinking that he had stopped doing films. But he has said several times that for the right project, he’d return.

At a special event celebrating the composer at the Juilliard School of Music in Manhattan, the president of Juilliard announced, at the end of the evening, that Williams was currently in Los Angeles, composing the score for the latest Spielberg movie: “John Williams, who is in Los Angeles doing what he does, […] is working with Steven Spielberg on the next movie. And that is something to be happy about.” (The famed music conservatory is where JW donated his personal collection of music scores for preservation)

“Everything is possible. Only our limitations are holding us back,” Williams told The Times (London) in 2023.

Spielberg’s next film has been kept deeply under wraps, with no title or logline yet released. At a press event held in Spielberg’s honor at the Universal backlot in 2024, a brief sizzle reel was shown with the film’s star, Emily Blunt, shooting an action sequence in which she jumps from a car to a train.

Josh O’Connor, Colin Firth, Eve Hewson, Colman Domingo and Wyatt Russell will also star in the film, which is written by “Jurassic Park” screenwriter David Koepp. Universal will release the film on June 12, 2026.

Principal photography began on February 26, 2025, in New Jersey, Atlanta, New York City and Huntington under the title Non-View, and wrapped in late May. It’s likely Williams has been working on the score for some time, and they’ve just made the announcement. It’s an original UFO story. Could it be a sequel to Close Encounters?

You can hear his gifts for weaving a golden thread of drama and spinning a thrilling swirl of orchestral action are still strong in this Indy cue. His new work will be on screen with the new movie next summer. 

Oxford University Press recently published the first authorized biography of Williams, John Williams: A Composer’s Life. The book generated some controversy when Williams said, in a rare personal interview: “Just the idea that film music has the same place in the concert hall as the best music in the canon is a mistaken notion, I think. A lot of film music is ephemeral. It’s certainly fragmentary and, until somebody reconstructs it, it isn’t anything that we can even consider as a concert piece.” John has been saying this privately for 50+ years. Many concert and film/game composers privately agree with the sentiment and reasoning. Yet Williams is often the exception, thanks to his exceptional talent, and the freedom certain directors like Lucas and Spielberg have given him to compose at a high level for long sequences.

Will this new film allow him uninterrupted screen time and provide a layered, magical, epic story so he can compose like he did for ET, or the deep subject, unusual characters, and stunning visuals like his underrated, heartfelt War Horse? Or will modern filmmaking, with it’s emphasis on many short segments, digital effects, and ambiguous emotions, keep the score in a supportive role? This is the artist’s question that only time, and Spielberg, can answer. Spielberg has evolved as a director, and doesn’t direct his films for melodic symphonic music the way he did decades ago. Williams is highly adaptable, and provided a modern, textural score for the Academy Award nominated The Post (2017). The most recent Spielberg-Williams film was 2022’s The Fabelmans, was lovely, yet minimal and textural more than melodic and symphonic scoring. Maybe right for the film and the times, yet exactly the kind of scoring that supports Williams’ comments on long term value as concert music. And that is clearly John Williams’ place in history, the film composer who brought that art to the world’s concert halls. I’m hoping this film takes a risk and let’s music lead the way again.