Al-Amn Magazine

DOCUMENTARY O The firs t rea l b l ockbus ter How ‘ Jaws ’ changed Ho l l ywood n 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 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. Prototype for the summer blockbuster 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