Jaws
1975 · 124 min
Directed by Steven Spielberg. Written by Carl Gottlieb, Peter Benchley. Starring Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss, Lorraine Gary.
When the seaside community of Amity finds itself under attack by a dangerous great white shark, the town's chief of police, a young marine biologist, and a grizzled shark hunter embark on a desperate quest to kill the beast before it strikes again.
Critics 97% · audiences 98% · streaming on Netflix · $261 million in the US and Canada on its first run · $602,000 elsewhere · about 128 million tickets sold, 59% of the country · 4 Oscar nominations, 3 won
What they said about Jaws
- 1975
a sensationally effective action picture, a scary thriller that works all the better because it's populated with characters that have been developed into human beings.
— Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times - 1975
It's a measure of how the film operates that not once do we feel particular sympathy for any of the shark's victims. ... In the best films, characters are revealed in terms of the action.
— Vincent Canby, The New York Times - 1975
is eminently worth seeing for its second half
— Marcia Magill, Films in Review - 1975
scare machine that works with computer-like precision. ... You feel like a rat, being given shock therapy
— Pechter, Commentary - 1975
for the most part, Jaws is a gripping horror film that works beautifully in every department
— Rex Reed
How it got made
Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown, producers at Universal Pictures, independently heard about Peter Benchley's novel Jaws. Brown came across it in the literature section of lifestyle magazine Cosmopolitan, which at that time was edited by his wife, Helen Gurley Brown. A small card written by the magazine's book editor gave a detailed description of the plot, concluding with the comment "might make a good movie". The producers each read the book over the course of a single night and agreed the next morning that it was "the most exciting thing that they had ever read" and that they wanted to produce a film version, although they were unsure how it would be accomplished. They purchased the film rights in 1973, before the book's publication, for approximately $175,000 (). Brown claimed that had they read the book twice, they would never have made the film because they would have realized how difficult it would be to execute certain sequences.
To direct, Zanuck and Brown first considered veteran filmmaker John Sturges—whose résumé included another maritime adventure, The Old Man and the Sea—before offering the job to Dick Richards, whose directorial debut, The Culpepper Cattle Co., had come out the previous year. They soon grew irritated by Richards's habit of describing the shark as a whale and dropped him from the project. Meanwhile, Steven Spielberg very much wanted the job. The 26-year-old had just directed his first theatrical film, The Sugarland Express, for Zanuck and Brown. At the end of a meeting in their office, Spielberg noticed their copy of the still-unpublished Benchley novel, and after reading it was immediately captivated. He later observed that it was similar to his 1971 television film Duel in that both deal with "these leviathans targeting everymen". He also revealed in "The Making of Jaws" documentary on the 2012 DVD release that he directly referenced Duel by repurposing the sound of the truck being destroyed as the death roar of the shark. After Richards's departure, the producers signed Spielberg to direct in June 1973, before the release of The Sugarland Express.
Before production began, Spielberg grew reluctant to continue with Jaws in fear of becoming typecast as the "truck and shark director". He wanted to move over to 20th Century Fox's Lucky Lady instead, but Universal exercised its right under its contract with the director to veto his departure. Brown helped convince Spielberg to stick with the project, saying that "after [Jaws], you can make all the films you want". The film was given an estimated budget of $3.5 million and a shooting schedule of 55 days. Principal photography was set to begin in May 1974. Universal wanted the shoot to finish by the end of June, when the major studios' contract with the Screen Actors Guild was due to expire, to avoid any disruptions due to a potential strike.
At the box office
Jaws opened in 409 theaters with a record $7 million weekend and grossed a record $21,116,354 in its first 10 days recouping its production costs. It grossed $100 million in its first 59 days from 954 playdates. In just 78 days, it overtook The Godfather as the highest-grossing film at the North American box office, sailing past that picture's earnings of $86 million, and became the first film to earn $100 million in US theatrical rentals. By September 1975, 40 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds had reportedly seen it. It spent 14 consecutive weeks as the number-one film in the United States, and its initial release ultimately brought in $123.1 million in rentals. Theatrical re-releases in 1976 and the summer of 1979 brought its total rentals to $133.4 million.
The film entered overseas release in December 1975, and its international business mirrored its domestic performance. It broke records in Singapore, New Zealand, Japan, Spain, and Mexico. On January 11, 1976, Jaws became the highest-grossing film worldwide with rentals of $132 million, surpassing the $131 million earned by The Godfather. By the time of the third film in 1983, Variety reported that it had earned worldwide rentals of $270 million. Jaws was the highest-grossing film of all time until Star Wars, which debuted two years later. Star Wars surpassed Jaws for the U.S. record six months after its release and set a new global record in 1978. All told, Jaws grossed $260 million in United States and Canada, and $470 million worldwide across its various releases in the 1970s.
As of 2014, Jaws had sold 128 million tickets in the United States and Canada making it the seventh-highest-grossing movie of all time adjusted for ticket price inflation, and 243 million tickets globally. Its inflation-adjusted worldwide gross of $2 billion in 2011 made it the second-most successful franchise film after Star Wars at the time. In the United Kingdom it was the tenth highest-grossing film released between 1975 and 2018, earning the equivalent of over £80 million in 2018 currency, with admissions estimated at 16.2 million. Jaws has also sold 13 million tickets in Brazil, a quantity first surpassed by Titanic in 1998, and that still ranks as the sixth most attended film in the country.
Afterwards
Herman Melville's Moby-Dick is the most notable artistic antecedent to Jaws. The character of Quint strongly resembles Captain Ahab, the obsessed captain of the Pequod who devotes his life to hunting a sperm whale. Quint's monologue reveals a similar obsession with sharks; even his boat, the Orca, is named after the only natural enemy of the white shark. In the novel and original screenplay, Quint dies after being dragged under the ocean by a harpoon tied to his leg, similar to the death of Ahab in Melville's novel. A direct reference to these similarities may be found in Spielberg's draft of the screenplay, which introduces Quint watching the film version of Moby-Dick; his continuous laughter prompts other audience members to get up and leave the theater. However, the scene from Moby-Dick could not be licensed from the film's star, Gregory Peck, its copyright holder. Screenwriter Carl Gottlieb also drew comparisons to Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea: "Jaws is ... a titanic struggle, like Melville or Hemingway."
The underwater scenes shot from the shark's point of view have been compared with passages in two 1950s horror films, Creature from the Black Lagoon and The Monster That Challenged the World. Gottlieb named two science fiction productions from the same era as influences on how the shark was depicted, or not: The Thing from Another World, which Gottlieb described as "a great horror film where you only see the monster in the last reel"; and It Came From Outer Space, where "the suspense was built up because the creature was always off-camera". Those precedents helped Spielberg and Gottlieb to "concentrate on showing the 'effects' of the shark rather than the shark itself". Scholars such as Thomas Schatz have described how Jaws melds various genres while essentially being an action film and a thriller. Most is taken from horror, with the core of a nature-based monster movie while adding elements of a slasher film. The second half is both a buddy film in the interaction between the crew of the Orca, and a supernatural horror based on the shark's depiction of a nearly Satanic menace. Ian Freer describes Jaws as an aquatic monster movie, citing the influence of earlier monster films such as King Kong and Godzilla. Charles Derry, in 1977, also compared Jaws to Godzilla; and Spielberg cited Godzilla, King of the Monsters! (1956) as a formative influence growing up, due to the "masterful" way in which "it made you believe it was really happening."
Critics such as Neil Sinyard have described similarities to Henrik Ibsen's play An Enemy of the People. Gottlieb himself said he and Spielberg referred to Jaws as "Moby-Dick meets Enemy of the People". The Ibsen work features a doctor who discovers that a seaside town's medicinal hot springs, a major tourist attraction and revenue source, are contaminated. When the doctor attempts to convince the townspeople of the danger, he loses his job and is shunned. This plotline is paralleled in Jaws by Brody's conflict with Mayor Vaughn, who refuses to acknowledge the presence of a shark that may dissuade summer beachgoers from coming to Amity. Brody is vindicated when more shark attacks occur at the crowded beach in broad daylight. Sinyard calls the film a "deft combination of Watergate and Ibsen's play".