How Jaws Invented the Summer Blockbuster

Martha's Vineyard, summer of nineteen seventy-four, and the crew are dragging the shark out of the Atlantic. Again. Twenty-five feet of steel and rubber, one point two tons, fourteen people needed just to work the thing, and the salt water has eaten its guts out. It doesn't work. It has basically never worked. The crew have started calling the picture Flaws, and the young director standing on that deck is quietly certain his career is finished. Hold that image. Because that broken machine is about to earn an estimated hundred and seventy-five million dollars... and invent your entire summer. Every summer. Forever. Here's what summer meant to Hollywood before this. Nothing. It was the dumping ground. Where you buried cheap teen flicks while the grown-up movies waited politely for Christmas. And films didn't open everywhere at once, either. You opened in a few big-city cinemas, and if people liked it, the prints trickled out across the country, town by town, like gossip. Opening wide on day one? That was what you did when you knew your movie stank and you wanted the money before word got round. The plan was fifty-five days of shooting. Three and a half million dollars. It took a hundred and fifty-nine days. The budget swelled to nine million, plus three million more in post. Spielberg has said that in a typical twelve-hour day, they got about four hours of actual filming. Sailboats wandered into the shot. The cast threw up over the side. He's called it the hardest production he ever worked on, and his words about it afterwards were: I had nightmares for a lot of years. So he did the only thing left to do. If the shark can't be in the movie... the shark isn't in the movie. He shot barrels. A fin. A yellow raft. The point of view of something underneath you, moving up. The great white does not appear on screen until one hour and twenty-one minutes in. Spielberg later called the breakdowns a godsend. He said he stopped making a Godzilla movie and started making a Hitchcock movie. But an invisible monster needs a voice. John Williams sits down at a piano and plays Spielberg... two notes. E. F. E, F, E, F. That's it. Spielberg laughed out loud. He'd been expecting something eerie, something melodic, and instead he's getting two fingers thumping the low keys like a bad joke. He genuinely thought Williams was winding him up. There was no punchline. The American Film Institute now ranks it the sixth greatest film score ever written. Now the part nobody puts on the poster. Marketing. Universal spent roughly seven hundred thousand dollars on national television spots, a record for the studio. Their publicity chief called it the largest advertising expenditure in the company's history. Two months out, Variety ran a Universal ad bragging about the biggest prime-time TV campaign in motion picture history. And then, three nights before opening, they carpet-bombed America. Thirty-second spots, over and over and over. And that poster. A swimmer up top. A mouth rising underneath. June twentieth, nineteen seventy-five. Four hundred and nine theaters. Opening weekend, seven million dollars. Four days into general release, nearly nine million. The whole production budget, earned back, in about two weeks. And then comes the strange bit. A wide opening was supposed to be a smash and grab. Get in, take the money, get out before anyone notices. This one wouldn't stop. Day seventeen, four hundred and sixty-four theaters. Day fifty-nine, nine hundred and fifty-four screens, and past a hundred million dollars. Nobody had ever seen a film behave like that. And here's the honest footnote, because the legend is always tidier than the truth. Historians will tell you Jaws did not invent the wide release. The Godfather opened in three hundred and sixty-five venues three years earlier. Variety's own verdict was that the remarkable thing wasn't the size of the debut... it was the persistence. It also took a second punch to make it law. Two years later, Spielberg's friend George Lucas, who had once stuck his head inside that mechanical shark's mouth for a laugh, did the whole thing again with a space movie. So that's why your July looks the way it does. The tentpole. The sequel. The trailer that follows you around the internet for a fortnight. An entire industry calendar bending toward a handful of hot weekends, all of it traceable back to a machine that sank, two notes on a piano, and a studio that panicked and bought every ad slot it could find. A hundred and seventy-five million dollars, Spielberg reckons, added to the box office by the thing that was supposed to ruin him. Sometimes the monster you can't show is the only one nobody forgets.