The Golden Years of Koepp

 

In Hollywood, screenwriters are one of lowest jobs on the creative totem pole. Since the beginning, producers and directors have used multiple screenwriters on any given project, often without credit. One of the most well-known names from this profession is David Koepp. He has been a successful working screenwriter for over 30 years. Koepp wrote or co-wrote some of the most memorable films of the 1990s and 2000s including: Death Becomes Her, Jurassic Park, Carlito’s Way, Mission Impossible, Spider-Man, Panic Room and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. In the years 2025-26, Koepp has had his best years ever with five of his screenplays playing in cinemas. I loved them all, with my favourite being a project particularly close to his heart.

Koepp began his miracle year with the screenplay for Presence (2025), a haunting family drama directed by Steven Soderbergh. Soderbergh uses a clever observational camera style to communicate the point of view of a ghost or presence in an average suburban American house after a new family has just moved in. Less interested in jump scares and cheap shocks, Koepp has fashioned an emotional chamber piece that uses the supernatural to deepen the resonances as he comments on the modern alienation of parents and their grown children. Due to its ghostly first-person narrative, Presence was a hard sell to audiences. Happily, it ended up as a significant financial success, mostly due to its low budget. Pay close attention, this is a film that gets better with a second viewing.

Koepp immediately teamed with Soderbergh for an encore, now switching genres and countries with the British espionage drama Black Bag (2025). Spotlighting the starring duo of Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender as a cool pair of married spies, Koepp keeps the audience guessing with this smart and stylish exercise in paranoia by asking the question: “Can you trust your spouse if neither of you can be honest about your jobs?”. Soderbergh and Koepp are clearly enjoying themselves with their colourful cast of characters, including the tongue-in-cheek casting of 007 Daniel Craig’s Miss Moneypenny Naomie Harris, and ex-Bond Pierce Brosnan as a sardonic spy master. This is John Le Carre territory updated for a savvy post millennial tech generation. Despite good publicity and solid praise from the critics, Black Bag failed to connect with a wide audience. Hopefully it will feel more at home within the variety provided by streaming programming.

For his summer blockbuster of 2025, Koepp returned to the franchise that made his name. Jurassic Park Rebirth (2025) is not so much a re-boot as it is a “requel”, continuing the original legacy storyline while featuring new characters that can take the series in a different direction. An improvement on the previous Chris Pratt Jurassic trilogy, Rebirth introduces Scarlett Johansson as a tough mercenary, and Jonathan Bailey as a paleontologist leading a specimen recovery team to one of the experimental genetics islands now completely populated by mutant dinosaurs. Although slightly burdened by the second longest running time in the series, this is a very entertaining late entry that benefits from Koepp’s extensive knowledge of the subject matter as well as his confident staging of the suspense scenes. If the franchise were to continue, it needed the kind of assured script that Koepp has delivered.

In 2019 David Koepp published his first novel Cold Storage, a sci-fi horror story that had started as an outline for a movie. Koepp has said he enjoyed the new medium of a longer narrative, taking advantage of the opportunity to deepen the backstories of his characters in a way that a shorter film script cannot. With its sterling pedigree and popular genre ingredients the novel was sold a film project almost immediately. Not surprisingly, Koepp was hired to adapt his own work, and he wasn’t afraid to alter the satirical tone of the book to a more comedic blend of gore and laughs. The resulting film of Cold Storage (2026) has to be one of the most affectionate recent homages to the horror comedies of the 1980s. Extra value is provided by two bona fide horror heroes: Joe Keery, one of the stars of the retro 80s Netflix series Stranger Things, and Brit scream queen Georgina Campbell, highly praised for her role in Barbarian (2022). Fresh from his hilarious turn in The Naked Gun (2025), Liam Neeson gives another facetious performance as a bioterror operative who suffers from chronic back pain at the most inconvenient times. Shot in 2023, this European production sat on the shelf for over a year before being dumped into cinemas in February 2026 where it received little advance publicity. Sadly, despite strong reviews, cinema goers only had a week to see it before it disappeared. Hopefully this labour of love will its audience on streaming.

Koepp soon had another project opening in the summer blockbuster season of 2026. One that came with high expectations as he re-united with his War of the Worlds (2005) director Steven Spielberg for another alien invasion epic tantalizingly entitled Disclosure Day. Thankfully this was a welcome return to the era when Spielberg was the most popular and talented filmmaker working in Hollywood. Koepp and Spielberg acknowledge that Disclosure Day is meant to be the third part of an alien encounter trilogy beginning with Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and followed by E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982). The story idea was developed by Spielberg and Koepp after researching the many recent alien spacecraft sightings that have re-ignited interest in the subject. Ever the showman, Spielberg can’t resist giving the audience the rollercoaster ride that it craves. With an infallible instinct where to put the camera, he effortlessly whips up a pleasing blend of suspense, emotional drama and action thrills. It is a solid piece of entertainment, although far from completely original. For example, keen cinephiles might nit pick his inspirations, including a villain obviously influenced by his friend and fellow film director Brian De Palma’s 1978 sci-fi/thriller The Fury. It is Spielberg’s most satisfying piece of genre filmmaking in nearly 20 years and it is all thanks to David Koepp – the screenwriter with the golden touch.