Birth Of The Summer Blockbuster: The Premiere of ‘Jaws’ Made the World Safe for Hollywood Hits
Summer blockbuster movies are now a staple of the movie industry, but when did the first one emerge and how? It all started in 1974 when during the last three months of the year, three all-star cast “disaster” movies drew fans to U.S. theaters in droves: Airport 1975 starring Charlton Heston; Earthquake, which amazingly also starred Heston; and The Towering Inferno with Steve McQueen were each rousing successes.
Another film that had been set for a Christmas 1974 release — one Heston had hoped to star in as well — was ultimately delayed for months and deemed a disaster of a whole different kind. Helmed by a fledgling director whose ideas seemed too big for his budget, it was plagued by crippling problems with special effects, a horrific shooting location and gnawing doubts by its producers.
And yet, somehow, upon completion, director Steven Spielberg‘s Jaws was deemed an absolute action-horror winner.
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But it wasn’t the astonishing quality alone that made Jaws the monster hit of 1975. It was also the imaginative way Universal chose to market it, with the company making the most of the delay to promote the film as the perfect summer movie. And with its success, Jaws 50 years ago birthed what we’ve come to know as the summer blockbuster.
How big a hit was the film? In 1974, Airport 1975, Earthquake and The Towering Inferno grossed $243 million combined. In 1975, Jaws grossed $478 million worldwide on its own. It became a cultural phenomenon and led Hollywood studios to begin using the hottest months of the year to coerce film fans into the air-conditioned comforts of multiplex theaters.
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“Not only was it summer and you were afraid of going to the beach, but [the movie] was just something that was on everyone’s lips,” recalls director J.J. Abrams in the 2025 Nat Geo documentary Jaws @ 50.
Would it sink or swim?
Young director Steven Spielberg had been determined to make Jaws after seeing an early galley of author Peter Benchley‘s novel; when the book became a bestseller, all signs pointed to something glorious. But the filming became a nightmare to match the plot of a beach town completely spooked by the appearance of a huge and deadly great white shark. Spielberg insisted on filming the movie in the actual ocean (instead of a studio tank) to increase authenticity, but the weather created plenty of obstacles. Making matters worse, Spielberg commissioned the making of several full-length mechanical sharks, but the salt water wreaked havoc on the parts, rendering them useless on many filming days. It seemed as if “Bruce” — the nickname given to the sharks, after Spielberg’s lawyer, Bruce Ramer — would end up being the death of the film.
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Many other things were going wrong as well. The script was being updated on a daily basis. The inimitable Robert Shaw, playing crusty local shark hunter Quint, seemed to take immense pleasure in annoying one of his main costars, the relatively new Richard Dreyfuss (as oceanographer Matt Hooper). Top star Roy Scheider (as police Chief Martin Brody, the role Heston had wanted) and the rest of the cast and crew were miserable but resolved to see this thing succeed despite all the snafus.
Ultimately, every negative turned out to be an amazing positive. The script had great, impulsive lines, the lack of a shark in most scenes gave the audience more to anticipate and the stress on the stars added tension to the film.
The ultimate screen gem
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Universal quickly understood it had a hit, and put its money where its jaws were, redefining movie marketing strategy forever. A whopping $1.8 million was put into the till to market Jaws, a plan that included the kind of primetime TV spot ad overload normally seen in presidential elections. Benchley and the film’s producers did interviews touting the paperback and the coming film. The poster, featuring a shark about to terrorize a lone swimmer, was provocative, and John Williams‘ theme, led by that frightening two-note “duh-dum,” became the sound of the summer.
The barrage of T-shirts, towels and other merch available, to go along with the ads and the tidal wave of promotion, created a different two-note effect: namely, “ka-ching!” In what was then a rare move, Universal saturated the market, releasing the film on Friday, June 20, on some 464 screens. It helped that the relatively new phenomenon of multiplex theaters made going to the movies that much easier. When nighttime came around on Sunday, the film had smashed the opening weekend box office record, taking in $7,061,513 nationally. By the end of August, with the film still keeping people out of the water and in theaters, it was on twice that many screens. It had also become a huge cultural touchstone. Speaking of the classic first-season Saturday Night Live sketch, Spielberg in the Jaws@50 documentary says, “I was in the audience when the ‘Landshark’ showed up. I was hysterical!”
A good omen
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Jaws was only the beginning of this mega-trend in movies. 20th Century Fox enjoyed some success with the same strategy the following year with The Omen, but the approach didn’t truly become the way of all Hollywood until the following year. That’s when Star Wars — a film with a similar popcorn appeal of Jaws, not to mention a production similarly plagued with problems — was released just days before Memorial Day weekend and built so much word of mouth that obsessed fans, many of whom screened it several times that summer, helped make it the highest-earning film ever … at the time. Summer became the place to break less serious, more bankable fare, as the makers of Grease, Animal House,The Amityville Horror and Rocky II discovered. Indeed, by the time the decade ended and Alien won the summer blockbuster sweepstakes, in theaters across America, everybody could hear us scream … and no one screamed louder than the moneymakers in Hollywood.
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Remind