How 'Jaws' Invented the Summer Blockbuster

On April 24, 1975, author and film historian Joseph McBride attended a preview screening of Jaws in Hollywood. Steven Spielberg’s now-classic thriller, about a great white shark terrorizing a New England resort town, wouldn’t be released for two more months, but McBride already sensed it would be big. 

“When the girl was pulled under by the shark at the beginning of the movie, the whole audience rippled like a wave,” he recalls. “They were screaming. I knew then it would be a blockbuster hit.” McBride, then a reporter for Variety, remembers thinking to himself: “If I weren’t at Variety, I would buy a lot of MCA [studio] stock.”

Once released, Jaws wasn’t just a blockbuster hit—it was a phenomenon, a “super-blockbuster,” in the words of Variety. It became the first movie to break $100 million at the box office (displacing The Godfather as the highest-grossing film up to that point). It captivated the media. It instilled in viewers such an acute fear of sharks that beach attendance took a well-documented hit. And it forever changed the movie business, introducing a culture of big summer releases, wall-to-wall marketing, feverish merchandising and as many spin-offs as the market will bear.

When Spielberg went out for ice cream that historic summer, he overheard customers raving about seeing Jaws six times; at home, he saw coverage of the phenomenon on network news. “That was the first time that it really hit me that it was a phenomenon,” Spielberg later recalled.

What the filmmaker could not have anticipated was how Jaws, which eventually earned more than $450 million worldwide, would reset Hollywood’s appetite for profit. It became the prototype for a new kind of summer blockbuster: a high-concept, high-budget, high-profile picture designed to appeal across demographic lines and play on thousands of screens. These were not just movies; they were cultural “events,” with stratospheric marketing budgets. And crucially, they generated profits for years on end, thanks to merchandising, sequels, home video, rereleases and endless reboots and spin-offs. Jaws itself triggered a spate of shameless rip-offs, such as 1977’s Orca and 1978’s Piranha, as well as three official sequels, none made by Spielberg.

Two years after Jaws, Star Wars, another summertime hit, blew past its box office record and unleashed one of the most lucrative intellectual property franchises of the last half century. The success of George Lucas’s space opera showed the industry that Jaws had not been a once-a-generation fluke—it was a model for summer blockbusters that could be studied and replicated. The movies got bigger and bigger as Hollywood began concentrating its resources on the year’s flashiest and most star-studded releases.

This phenomenon also shifted the seasonal logic of Hollywood studios, which back then typically saved the biggest releases for the year-end holiday season. Soon they realized there was tremendous money to be made in summer. In his book Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer, critic Tom Shone points out that, in 1975, summer moviegoing accounted for only 32 percent of annual business. By 1996—a year defined by summer megahits like Independence Day and Mission: Impossible—that percentage had nearly doubled.

The practice of large-scale hawking of movie merchandise can also be traced back to Jaws. As Shone observes in Blockbuster, the early merchandising of “Jawsmania” was a grassroots phenomenon, “driven not by the studio but by private profiteers, pirates or just entrepreneurs with a single goofy idea.” Universal did sell Jaws T-shirts and towels, but the more creative ideas emerged independently of the studio and exploited an untapped fan enthusiasm: a Georgia fisherman selling shark jawbones, for instance, or an ice cream stand with Jaws-inspired flavors like “finilla” instead of vanilla. 

By the time George Lucas made Star Wars, he saw the potential and shrewdly agreed to waive a $500,000 fee from Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation in exchange for retaining the merchandising and sequel rights. The deal paid off enormously: Star Wars-themed merchandise earned $20 billion over the next 35 years as the toys, action figures and Lego sets filled homes worldwide. Subsequent franchises, like Indiana Jones or Back to the Future, similarly spawned extensive merchandise and collectible lines.

Jaws also changed how movies are released, in a literal sense. The film opened in more than 400 theaters, making it an unusually wide release at the time—though not, contrary to popular belief, the first film with a so-called saturation release. In 1974, McBride notes, The Trial of Billy Jack opened in more than 1,000 theaters during its opening week, despite or perhaps because it was critically panned.

“The attitude previously was, if you had a very wide opening, it meant it wasn’t a very good film and they were trying to get their money quickly before the word of mouth spread,” says McBride, author of Steven Spielberg: A Biography. “If you had a quality film, they would open it in a few theaters in major cities and then gradually expand it. They’d open films in New York and L.A. and Chicago and let the word get around.” 

Jaws overhauled that mentality, revealing the logic of a massive first-week release accompanied by heavy national advertising (and, crucially, positive word of mouth). “A lot of people claim that Spielberg and Lucas ruined Hollywood, which I think is simplistic,” McBride says. “Because those films did cause the blockbuster phenomenon to become dominant.”

In McBride’s view, what actually ruined Hollywood was the television advertising that accompanied these gargantuan releases. “When you have a 30-second spot to sell a film, it becomes very simplistic. And then they had to design films so they could be described in a 30-second spot.”

Film fans frustrated by the endless scourge of sequels, prequels and reboots filling up the multiplexes today and crowding out more original, character-driven films may be tempted to blame Jaws for the world it wrought. In his 1990 essay “Blockbuster: The Last Crusade,” film historian Peter Biskind argued that Spielberg and Lucas were responsible for “obliterat[ing] years of sophisticated, adult moviegoing habits” and reducing “an entire culture to childishness”; studios, in turn, fell in thrall to “the Roman-numeral movie, product of the obsession with surefire hits.”

Before becoming a classic, Jaws itself initially earned mixed reviews, with critics focusing praise on its strong characterizations and performances. And its soundtrack and suspenseful editing won awards. As it turns out, the filming of Jaws had traumatized Spielberg—the mechanical shark rarely worked, and the nightmarish production ran 100 days over schedule. But the director used those technical limitations to his advantage, rendering the shark a sensed but unseen menace with Hitchcockian flair. It felt, in his words, “almost like I’m directing the audience with an electric cattle prod,” and the approach worked. The film’s success anointed him a figurehead of the New Hollywood movement and a millionaire before age 30; its savvy direction blurred lines between lowbrow “creature feature” and psychological drama. 

“It’s so much more than just a thriller,” says filmmaker and author Laurent Bouzereau, director of the documentary Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story. “It feels like a horror movie at times, and at times it’s a drama about three men being tested to their limits, and they each represent a very specific archetypal figure. Some of the most riveting scenes in the film have nothing to do with the shark.”

Fifty years after its release, what stands out about Jaws is how Spielberg took a template for a generic creature feature and made it into a gripping thriller about primal fears, small-town corruption and an eternal battle between man and beast. In other words, “it went from being a potential B-movie to being an A+ movie,” Bouzereau says.