50th Years Of Jaws!

 You know a movie is good when it still looks just as good as it did when it first came out and Jaws certainly has lived up to the standard it set 50 years ago. Sorry if I made anyone feel old lol.

One of the things that I learned about during my research for this blog was the simple fact that this movie was based on a book that was written by Peter Benchley (RIP) a year earlier. In fact, Benchley admitted that he regretted writing it because he believed that it caused fear and fake rumors about sharks, so he became an advocate for marine conservation. 

The film stars Roy Scheider as police chief Martin Brody, who, with the help of a marine biologist (Richard Dreyfuss) and a professional shark hunter (Robert Shank), go on a hunt for a human eating great white shark that has been eating beachgoers at a New England summer resort.

Jaws was the first major motion picture to be filmed on the ocean and it constantly had issues throughout it's production from going over budget and schedule.

Plus the biggest issues that the crew faced was the constant malfunctions with the different mechanical sharks. 

Maybe it was a blessing in disguise because director Steven Spielberg decided to use the shark sparingly. Which honestly, worked to perfection because not having the shark show up to often really brought in the scare factor for me in my humble opinion. Plus we all got to give a ton of credit to the effort put into the music for when the shark attacks by John Williams. Still to this very day, when I heard that song being played, gives me the creeps.

It is a little funny to me when I read about the production going over budget as according to what I found was the budget was nine million dollars. Which is interesting considering how big some of the budgets are with movies nowadays.

What isn't funny, is how much this movie made because holy cow it is incredible. Again, from a nine million dollar budget, Jaws scored massive box-office success with a grand total 495 million dollars. 😮

At the time, Jaws was the highest grossing film of all-time. Unfortunately, it did not last very long as literally two years later, another incredible movie debuted in the form of Star Wars.

What I found even more amazing was how it was re-released in 2025 and was the second highest grossing film of the weekend only behind the new a horror movie called Weapons which just goes to show how no matter how old a movie is, good stories will always bring people back to the theater.

Congrats to Jaws for 50 years!

Until Next Time!

God Bless and Be Safe Everybody! 🙏🙏🙏