Jaws at 50: How Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster shark film changed Hollywood

Peele’s insistence on not showing us the creature directly until deep into the film, the themes of human greed vs ‘animal’ hunger, the way the camera captures the horrified, awestruck reactions of everybody who encounters the creature — all of it was reminiscent of perhaps Hollywood’s first true blockbuster, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, which released 50 years ago today, on June 20, 1975.

In a recent National Geographic documentary about Jaws, Jordan Peele spoke about the transformative effect the movie had on Hollywood, singling out “the mystical connection between hero and monster” as its most revolutionary aspect.

Jaws involved a man-eating great white shark terrorising beachgoers at a fictional summer resort town called Amity Island. Just like its spiritual successor Nope had the two sibling-protagonists hunting down the monster, Jaws featured an alliance between its three main characters — strait-laced police chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider), maverick shark-hunter Quint (Robert Shaw) and nerdy oceanographer Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss).

The cinematic legacy of Jaws

Quite simply, Jaws invented the Hollywood ‘creature movie’ template. In the years following its release, there were a number of movies featuring predatory creatures (mostly underwater), like Barracuda (1977), Alligator (1980) and Orca (1977). The most popular among these knockoffs was Piranha (1978), which introduced a morbid comic-horror tonality to the formula. Spielberg himself would later say that Piranha was his personal favourite among the Jaws copycats. In 2010, the film was remade as Piranha 3D, with Richard Dreyfuss making a cameo appearance as a parody of his Jaws character Matt Hooper.

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The handprints of Jaws over the creature movie genre can be seen in 21st century triumphs such as Cloverfield, directed by Matt Reeves (better known these days as the maker of the Robert Pattinson Batman movie). Cloverfield (a film about an otherworldly monster attacking New York City) turned Spielberg’s directorial restraint into a marketing gimmick, concealing the appearance and abilities of the film’s monster — no trailers or promotional material showed us what the Cloverfield creature looked like.

The great white shark itself is a symbological vessel in Jaws, containing the sum total of classic American fears, existential threats to the way of life espoused by the Amity Island holiday crowd — consumerist, devil-may-care fun interrupted brutally by the seemingly irrepressible forces of nature. Frederic Jameson, in his essay Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture (1979), outlines some of these fears.

Jameson wrote: “Thus critics from Gore Vidal and Pravda all the way to Stephen Heath have tended to emphasize the problem of the shark itself and what it ‘represents’: such speculation ranges from the psychoanalytic to historic anxieties about the Other that menaces American society-whether it be the Communist conspiracy or the Third World-and even to internal fears about the unreality of daily life in American today, and in particular the haunting and unmentionable persistence of the organic — of birth, copulation, and death — which the cellophane society of consumer capitalism desperately re-contains in hospitals and old age homes (…)”

Beyond its cinematic influence, Jaws impacted the real world in a surprising way. Audiences across the country suddenly became mortally frightened of shark attacks, even though sharks attacking humans in the wild is an exceedingly rare phenomenon. The large-scale trophy hunting of sharks, therefore, acquired the shield of righteousness and morality and the shark population of North America was drastically reduced through the 80s and the 90s. So much so that both Steven Spielberg and the novel’s author Peter Benchley later expressed regret for their role in this sequence of events.

“Knowing what I know now, I could never write that book today,” Benchley said, years after the film’s release during a BBC interview. “Sharks don’t target human beings, and they certainly don’t hold grudges.”

Ushered in Hollywood’s studio-first era

Jaws was also a pioneer in terms of how it marketed and sold itself. At the time of its release, Hollywood depended upon critics’ reviews and word-of-mouth publicity. Films would stay in theatres for longer, slowly developing its audience and accumulating revenue steadily over time.

Jaws changed all of that with an expensive, high-intensity, brute-force marketing campaign that flooded TV channels and newspapers in particular — basically inventing the modern-day Hollywood promo playbook. The concept of the ‘summer blockbuster’ — high-concept, VFX-heavy action thrillers — was arguably born with Jaws and then, just a few years later, Star Wars.

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Even more consequential was the decision to book nearly 500 theatres simultaneously for its release, an astonishingly large number for its time. Today, this is standard practice for Marvel movies, called ‘saturation booking’. The idea is to deprive moviegoing people of options — if you are going to the movies in these next few weeks, you simply have to see whatever Marvel is rolling out.

In Lester Friedman’s 2006 book Citizen Spielberg, he quotes the writer Peter Biskind to show us the film’s impact on Hollywood’s modus operandi. “Jaws changed the business forever (…) diminishing the importance of print reviews, making it virtually impossible for a film to build slowly, finding its audience by dint of mere quality. In a sense, Spielberg was the Trojan horse through which the studios began to reassert their power (…). Such was Spielberg’s (and Lucas’s) influence that every studio movie became a B movie, and at least for the big action blockbusters that dominate the studios’ slates, second unit has replaced first unit.”

However, Friedman also notes that, according to him, Biskind’s analysis was a touch overblown. Friedman said, “The creator cannot be held accountable for the illegitimate offspring of his original creation — not even for those dreadful Jaws sequels. Spielberg should also not be held liable for the way that studios choose to sell their products, even if they base some of their marketing decisions on the popularity of his film.”

How it tore up the rule book

Whether you’re Team Biskind or Team Friedman in this particular argument, one thing is for sure — the workings of the massive 21st century movie studios were “foreshadowed” in the way Hollywood studios reasserted creative and financial control in the wake of Jaws’ success.

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Producers now insisted upon action thrillers, visual effects, all the trappings of the spectacle movie. If the director strayed from the path charted by the studio, reshoots would be ordered and executed discreetly, often with a second unit.

Marvel has received a lot of criticism in recent years for what is often called its “filmmaking by committee” wherein every decision is seemingly focus-grouped to oblivion, where the nebulous, ever-shifting “fan consensus” is the most powerful entity in the room.

I rewatched Jaws ahead of writing this essay and the thing that immediately struck me upon finishing the film was — I had not checked my phone for the entirety of the two-hour runtime. And this is a film where the main villain has no lines, and the main hero isn’t really heroic at all. In short, Jaws tore up the rulebook and created new templates for Hollywood. Unfortunately, contemporary Hollywood appears to have internalised the templates but very little of the artistry that makes Jaws so very special even today.