After 50 years, we’re still living in a 'Jaws' world

Steven Spielberg’s movie, a half-century ago, ushered in a blockbuster era that hasn’t ended yet.

Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, and with it the modern blockbuster era that has continued to this day, turns 50 years old on Friday. Other than The Jazz Singer, or other technological breakthroughs of the early cinema era, it’s hard to imagine a movie in history that changed movies more than Jaws did.

While it came in the middle of the New Hollywood era of the 1970s, a movement led by people who were Spielberg’s friends and contemporaries — many of whom, like Spielberg, are still active filmmakers five decades later — Jaws set Hollywood on a road to massive box office figures and even more massive spectacles. It also introduced and popularized certain tropes that are still seen in big movies today.

Jaws became the highest-grossing film of all time, in that summer of 1975, before it was overtaken two years later by the original Star Wars, directed by Spielberg’s pal George Lucas.

And it all started with a small and simple story about a New England beach town being terrorized by a killer shark. And the key decision, one that Spielberg famously insisted on from the beginning, was that we don’t see the shark for the first time until the movie is about halfway over. It builds up anticipation and dread.

Another key decision? The score by John Williams, one of those movie scores that gets in your head if you as much as think about the movie. It’s hard to imagine this movie with any other music.

The film stars a trio of men who bring different skills to the table in the ultimate fight to defeat the shark: Roy Scheider’s sheriff, Robert Shaw’s grizzled shark hunter, and Richard Dreyfuss’ scientist. Blockbusters would continue to use some version of that combination in the ensuing years; Richard Dreyfuss’ scientist character has been reflected in blockbusters ever since, played by Jeff Goldblum in the Jurassic Park and Independence Day franchises.

Spielberg is now 78, and he was just 28 then, part of the movie brat generation. Jaws was just his second film that saw a theatrical release, after Sugarland Express the year before, although Duel was an impactful TV movie before that.