Very few films reach the status of “iconic.”
The Godfather, The Shawshank Redemption, Back To The Future, Star Wars all come to mind – but what’s the other film that everyone else has seen and has very strong feelings about?
Why, that film is Jaws.
To mark the 50th anniversary of the film, Steven Spielberg’s film will be shown in cinemas across Dublin, both Northside and Southside (consult your local cinema’s listings for exact times).
It’s fair to say that Jaws has stood the test of time, and it’s a certainty that articles will be written for the film’s 100th anniversary in 2075; we’re going to drill down into why a movie about three men on a boat and a dangerous shark has endured for so long in the culture.
To this day, there are still people afraid of going in the water because of this movie.
You can’t buy marketing like that!
Based on a novel by Peter Benchley (who also co-wrote the films screenplay) Jaws’ story is timeless and has basically reached the level of mythological at this stage.
In the summer of 2020, you couldn’t move on social media without seeing politicians who wanted businesses to open up again, and someone inevitably comparing them to the Mayor from Jaws who wants the beaches open for the 4th of July weekend.
There’s another factor in Jaws’ timelessness; it was the very first film to popularise the summer blockbuster as we now know it.
Everything we take for granted about cinema-going in the modern day (the advertising campaigns, knowing the release date months in advance, merchandise) all pretty much started with Jaws.
In other words, Jaws could have been a 2025 summer blockbuster and not looked out of place.
There were big box office hits before Jaws (just two years earlier, The Exorcist caused a cultural revolution and a decade before that, The Sound Of Music ), but none hit quite like Jaws did.
Prior to the release of Jaws, films were released at any time of the year with relatively little rhyme or reason behind it; The Exorcist was famously released at Christmas in 1973 in the United States.
With Jaws, Universal made the decision to release the film in the summertime and made sure the film was released in a few hundred screens right across America instead of the traditional method of showing it in a few select cities before expanding nationwide.
Upon release in the United States in June 1975, the film quickly became a runaway success; adjusted for inflation, the film made $1.1 billion adjusted for inflation at the American box office alone, and that’s before international numbers, TV rights, and home video are factored in.
It is fair to say that Jaws invented the modern blockbuster as we know it; just two years later, Spielberg’s pal George Lucas built upon the success and marketing strategy of Jaws with a little film called Star Wars.
Without the groundwork laid by Jaws, however, Star Wars wouldn’t have become the defining cultural event of a generation.
Merchandise for films was a very primitive market in 1975, certainly not what we have today with fast-food tie-ins or t-shirts, so Jaws was ahead of the curve.
It’s that sense of history that has helped Jaws stay relevant in the culture; this sense that it’s an important historical document.
But you didn’t come to this article to hear about how Jaws was revolutionary in the film marketing sense; you want to hear from a critic about why the film is so good (despite the fact that literal academic papers and countless other critics have written about it), but we will try our best.
TV airings are a major part of why Jaws has endured in the culture; it’s a film that has a magnetic effect on people.
If RTÉ or ITV ever shows Jaws at night, it’s nearly impossible to watch just 10 minutes of it; you’re more than likely to end up watching the entire thing.
Jaws also benefits from something that other 70s films benefit from; it has a sense of verisimilitude that makes these kinds of films appealing to watch, even today.
The three stars of Jaws – Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss and Robert Shaw – all represent three different types of guys who couldn’t possibly be movie stars today.
Movie stars in 2025 are required to have Instagram and have bodies like Greek gods; in films from the 1970s, movie stars looked like normal guys.
Think of the big stars of the era – Nicholson, Hackman, Hoffman – they all looked like regular guys on the street.
Scheider was the co-star in The French Connection in 1971, the first real film of the 1970s and the first sign that the New Hollywood era was here to stay; in that film, and in Jaws, Scheider’s no-nonsense everyman quality makes him stand out from the pack.
His co-stars, Dreyfus and Shaw, add extra flavour.
Dreyfus is perfectly cast as the city slicker brought down to explore the strange goings-on in the New England town, while Shaw is the grizzled old hunter who distrusts authority.
Throw those three dynamite personalities together – the Id, the Ego and the Superego, as Freud calls it – and watch the fireworks go off.
Jaws has a lot of famous moments (the head floating up, the opening kill, the panic on the beach), but the film really sings in the moments where it’s Scheider, Dreyfus and Shaw together, just three men with nothing but each other and a rickety boat, all trying to beat the shark.
There is class tension in both the book and the film, namely between Dreyfus and Shaw, and that extra bite adds something that you don’t usually see in other films.
That’s the great thing about films from the 1970s; they were more than happy to stop the film dead in its tracks to have a discussion about class tension.
By 1975, the New Hollywood era was very firmly established.
The late 1960s revolution, spurred by Bonnie and Clyde and Midnight Cowboy, had fully taken over the show by 1975; The Godfather, The French Connection, and Cabaret are just some examples of how films that wouldn’t have been touched a decade prior were now winning Oscars and becoming huge box office draws.
Jaws’ competition in 1975 was remarkable; the film won 3 of its 4 Oscar nominations (John Williams rightfully winning for score, as well as editing and sound), but it lost out in the bigger categories to another massive hit of 1975; One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.
Spielberg was a mere 28 years old when the film was released in cinemas, and there is a famous clip of Spielberg recording himself watching the Oscar nominations come in, fully expecting to be nominated for Best Director.
The young Spielberg was shut out by Milos Forman, the Czech maestro who directed One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Italian legend Fedricio Fellini, and fellow New Hollywood stablemates Robert Altman and Sidney Lumet.
During the early days of the pandemic, everyone became fixated on the Michael Jordan documentary The Last Dance; it was a rare glimpse into what makes one of the biggest names in culture tick.
The video of the young Spielberg, feeling aggrieved, is one of the great historical documents Hollywood has.
Spielberg made the biggest film of all time, at 28 years old, and he still couldn’t get his flowers from the establishment?
It was that drive that put him on a generational run, culminating in Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan.
Watching Jaws and comparing it to Spielberg’s most recent work, such as his West Side Story remake, is like watching an old clip of Lionel Messi playing for Barcelona in 2006.
Even then, you knew the guy was scarily talented, and you watch it knowing he’s going to surpass it and rewrite culture around him.
All of these elements come together and make the film still stand out half a century later.
If you haven’t seen the film with a crowd and on a big screen, it goes without saying that you should make it your business to catch Jaws in your local cinema for the 50th anniversary.