Hollywood icon Steven Spielberg’s Jaws was released 50 years ago today and quickly became the highest grossing movie in cinema history. The filmmaker’s career, the summer blockbuster, and our modern obsession with sharks all owe their existence mostly to Jaws, and a new anniversary release (including documentary Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story) all prove it just gets better with age.
American actor Richard Dreyfuss (L) and British actor Robert Shaw (1927 – 1978) hold ropes while … More
Jaws – Trial By Water
Spielberg began shooting in May 1974 on Martha’s Vineyard, insisting on real ocean locations for authenticity. The eight-week shoot ballooned to 159 days and the budget soared from $4 million to nearly $10 million.
Every day brought new woes, as rough seas wrecked shots, boats drifted into frame, equipment failed, and the mechanical shark seldom worked as intended. There were actually three “Bruces” built, but saltwater corroded their innards, causing one shark to sink and others to fall apart. “We never fixed the shark, and it was a total disaster,” Spielberg later admitted of those early trials.
Faced with constant delays and a creature that wouldn’t cooperate, Spielberg improvised. He and co-writer Carl Gottlieb were rewriting nightly to work around the malfunctioning shark, slashing its screen time and letting imagination fill in the gaps. Spielberg’s ingenuity transformed a B-movie into Hitchcockian suspense.
Yet during the shoot, Spielberg felt anything but confident. Morale was low among a crew stuck at sea for months, far over schedule and far from home. The director was anxiety-ridden, fearing he’d be fired at any moment, so much so that he refused to leave the island even on weekends. “If I left the island I was certain I would never come back,” he recalled.
At one point, Spielberg even suffered what he thought was a heart attack on set. It was actually a panic attack, brought on by stress (as he says now, “We didn’t have words like PTSD then” to describe the toll). When the final scene wrapped, the 27-year-old filmmaker was convinced his career was over.
Of course, Spielberg’s fears proved unfounded. Instead, Jaws’s torturous production forged a generational filmmaker. The young director’s “trials by water” taught him hard lessons in resourcefulness and resilience. In the following decades, Spielberg would never again face such loss of control on set or financial perils. Jaws’s success granted him creative control for life. But he also never forgot the experience, always saying Jaws made him a better director, and exorcised some personal fears. Spielberg noted that perhaps Jaws was even his own fear of water incarnate.
Five decades on, Spielberg participates fondly in 50th anniversary retrospectives, able to laugh about the nightmare shoot that became legendary. As he says in the Jaws @ 50 documentary, making the film involved “naive people against nature,” and it taught him “you’re gonna need a bigger boat” in more ways than one.
Jaws Births The Blockbuster
Before Jaws, the summer months were a Hollywood dead zone reserved for B movies or ignored entirely. Jaws turned that wisdom on its head.
Universal Pictures had boldly decided to market Jaws as a must-see summer event, even delaying its release to June so that “people were in the water off the summer beach resorts,”producer David Brown noted. They blanketed television with millions of dollars worth of ads – unprecedented at the time – and plastered the now-famous image of a shark and swimmer on posters, book covers, and merchandise everywhere.
Tie-ins ranged from Jaws-themed clothing to beach towels to hilarious toilet-seat covers. Jaws was everywhere before it even opened. The tagline “See it before you go swimming,” was a dare that became a cultural catchphrase. This strategy worked better than anyone could possibly have imagined.
Audiences flocked to cinemas, especially multiplexes at the malls. Many returned for multiple viewings, bringing friends along. An event movie mentality was born, and Jaws became the highest-grossing film of all time after a record debut and months atop the box office charts.
By the end of that summer, the sleepy months had become prime box-office real estate. As screenwriter Carl Gottlieb later pointed out, Jaws’s release proved selling a film “as a phenomenon, as a destination” could yield huge results.
It’s a lesson Hollywood would take to heart.
Jaws – From Popcorn Hit to Classic
On its 10th anniversary in 1985, Jaws was already enshrined as a pop culture icon spawning imitators and its own weak sequels, as audiences’ appetite for sharks remained strong. Meanwhile, directors like James Cameron and John Landis were citing Jaws as formative, and products from toys to theme-park rides continued to rake in money and prove the films’ continued popularity. At 10 years old, Jaws was demonstrating its generational staying power.
The 25th anniversary in 2000 saw Jaws celebrated by fans and a new generation of filmmakers. Although initially some critics turned up their noses at the film as low-brow entertainment, by 2000 Jaws was almost universally lauded and the film frequently landed on “greatest movies” lists.
The 30th anniversary in 2005 saw hundreds of fans descend on Martha’s Vineyard for JawsFest, a large fan gathering including cast reunions, tours, and panel discussions with Jaws experts.
By the time Jaws’s 45th anniversaries rolled around, society was locked down in the Covid pandemic’s first year, terror gripping communities worldwide. And once again, Jaws proved its relevance. With indoor cinemas mostly shuttered, drive-in theaters sprang up across the country, and what was the top draw? Jaws, of course, sometimes in double features with Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. You can read my own review for the film’s 45th anniversary release here.
Now, for the 50th anniversary this year, Jaws is getting the full treatment. Martha’s Vineyard, forever synonymous with Amity Island, is hosting commemorative screenings, Jaws-themed concerts, and a “shark in the park” event.
The Academy Museum in Los Angeles has opened a special exhibit featuring the last surviving Jaws shark prop (restored to its former toothy glory). Notably, there is the brand-new aforementioned documentary Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story. And of course, there is a 4K UHD special edition home release of Jaws for the 5oth anniversary, including the documentary, which I’ll discuss more below.
Jaws And Me Five Decades Later
Jaws turns 50 the same summer I turn 55. Jaws is my favorite film, encompassing my feelings as a young wide-eyed child seeing it for the first time at a drive-in (talk about larger than life, especially for a small kid) and then rewatching it endlessly on TV and VHS until the tapes wore out.
Much of my early years revolved around my love of comics and films, with Jaws, Taxi Driver, Star Wars, and Superman being among the biggest focuses of my attention and remaining long-lasting favorites and influences.
In my teen years, I was more interested in music and other pursuits, and aside from a handful of films – including The Terminator, Aliens, Witness, The Right Stuff, Platoon, Die Hard, and Raising Arizona – mid- and late-1980s cinema is mostly something I rediscovered in college when I went back to see what I’d missed.
In those first few years, Jaws represented a grounded realistic portrayal at immense scale, horrifying and thrilling and funny, at once seeming like ordinary everyday life and yet also mythic and consequential. My small mind grasped much of that, even if in simplistic and more limited form.
But as I grew up, and as I watched more films and read more comics and spent more time on boats and in life itself, Jaws seemed to grow and take on new relevance. It revealed itself to me in different ways, and in turn helped me also think about its themes and the world in different ways as well. It is one of the films that most made me dream of making my own movies, and its been an immense influence on my own approach to dialogue, pacing, and sequencing when I write screenplays.
I personally think of Jaws as primarily a suspense thriller with horror elements, rather than an outright horror movie, but I won’t argue with anyone who puts it in the latter category. Interestingly, the extent to which it leans more toward thriller or horror often depends on which themes and perspectives are at the forefront of my mind and interpretations while viewing it, including any subtextual social relevance I bring into the screening.
Mark Travers’ excellent 50th anniversary piece about Jaws notes the way ambiguity enhances our fear by letting our own minds fill in the horror-blanks, so to speak. This is similar to the same reason I’m a fan of zombie films – they’re less about the literal particulars of zombies than whatever the zombies come to represent in the minds of individual and collective viewers. Zombies are a metaphor for whatever terrifies and threatens us, be it pandemics or nuclear war or climate change or civil war, the living dead are an empty slate upon which we write our own nightmares.
Jaws is a perfect early example of this, within a more refined context as Travers discusses. And the way the shark is more menacing and more terrifying when we don’t see it speaks to a point Robert Patterson’s Bruce Wayne makes during his opening narration in Matt Reeves’ The Batman when he says that because he could be anywhere, scared villains see him everywhere.
Jaws – The Legacy Lives On
Half a century after it first made audiences cry and popcorn fly, Jaws remains a powerful force in pop culture. Its legacy is seen every year when summer movie season rolls around. Its DNA is present whenever a filmmaker holds back a monster reveal to build suspense, or a blockbuster balances character moments with eye-popping thrills. Its cautionary themes about respecting nature, heeding warnings and science, and finding courage are as relevant as ever. And in the simple act of scaring people out of the water, Jaws achieved a kind of immortality that few movies ever do.
Modern viewers are still struck by how Jaws, despite launching the modern era of big-budget popcorn spectacle, remains a relatively modestly human-scaled thriller at heart. Compared to today’s CGI-filled epics, Jaws was a mid-budget film that relied on character, suspense, and primal fear more than flashy effects. When the time for effects did come, the realism and selective use made them all the more impressive and scary.
In fact, many argue Hollywood took the wrong lessons from Jaws, that studios focused on “bigger boat” spectacle rather than what truly made the film great – its tight storytelling and craft. The real keys were suspense, relatable characters, and Spielberg’s deft directing.
Thus, while Jaws undeniably gave Hollywood a new formula for summer hits, it also stands apart from the very blockbusters it inspired. Jaws would thrive in any era.
Indeed, the modern masterpiece Godzilla Minus One from writer-director-VFX Supervisor Takashi Yamazaki is heavily inspired by Jaws. The film reflects the best sort of inspiration from Spielberg’s film, including the power of character-driven storytelling, suspense and anticipation, and a brilliant vision from its director.
If you want a particularly great 50th anniversary of Jaws, the new 4K UHD edition and the gorgeous Godzilla Minus One/Minus Color make for a perfect pairing. Then watch the anniversary documentary Jaws @ 50 (either on the excellent physical home release, or when it runs on National Geographic/Hulu/Disney+) for insightful and revelatory conversations with cast and crew, including Spielberg’s conversations about his own reactions and lingering traumas over the many years and decades after making Jaws.
For Spielberg and the cast and crew, it probably seems astonishing that a film made under such duress could endure so powerfully. But perhaps it’s precisely those challenges that made Jaws great, the creative solutions and on-the-fly brilliance born from chaos and necessity.
Jaws transcended its humble “summer thriller” origins to become a classic. Despite the great Roger Ebert’s own glowing review, many of his contemporaries couldn’t all see of its greatness, with many dismissing it as nonsense or mere shock entertainment. But time has vindicated Jaws. Today, it is firmly entrenched as a historic turning point in American cinema, dissected in film courses, and beloved by filmmakers and audiences alike.
From its metaphorical depths exploring fear of the unknown and the perils of greed and hubris, to its lasting impact on filmmaking and pop culture, five decades on Jaws remains a timeless masterpiece reflecting changes in Hollywood and society, even as it continues to scare new generations out of the water.
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