Steven Spielberg's Most Important Blockbuster of All Time Is Officially Back on Streaming

Before 1975, most movies had gradual releases. They would usually open in big cities first, like New York and Los Angeles. Then the distributor would partially rely on word of mouth to build an audience for a movie as it was released in more and more theaters. Back then, the summer was also the dead season for movies. The conventional wisdom said that people were doing summer activities at that time and nobody wanted to spend their free time inside between May and September. Instead, the biggest movies generally came out during the holiday season.

That all changed with the release of one movie, which still stands as one of the greatest films ever made (and a good one to watch on Netflix now that it's available to stream).

Jaws is about a great white shark terrorizing a small New England beach town called Amity Island. After a young woman is killed by the shark, Police Chief Martin Brody, a transplant from New York City, wants to close the beach, but he is met with resistance from the mayor (Murray Hamilton), who doesn’t want to cause a panic or lose any revenue from beach-seeking tourists who vacation on Amity Island.

When more attacks occur, they cause a panic. This brings marine biologist Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) into town to help track down the creature. Eventually, Brody and Hooper turn to Amity Island's most notorious shark hunter, Quint (Robert Shaw), to take down the shark with them.

Image: National Geographic

Jaws was a troubled production. Universal gave $3.5 million to promising young director Steven Spielberg to make a movie adaptation of Peter Benchley’s best-selling 1974 novel about a killer shark, but problems with the mechanical shark and difficulties with filming in the actual ocean ballooned the budget to $9 million. That might seem like chump change in an era when Marvel movies cost half a billion dollars to make, but back then it was a lot of money to put into a movie. Eventually, Spielberg went so over budget and over schedule that he feared he’d never get to direct a movie again.

Famously, the malfunctioning shark inadvertently led to Spielberg making a better picture. He had no choice but to use the shark sparingly, which increased the suspenseof an impending shark attack as opposed to the attacks themselves. The opening scene, where the shark kills a young woman in the ocean, was supposed to show the creature, but the version we got is infinitely more terrifying. Spielberg's forced restraint all pays off in spectacular fashion during the finale, when the movie's three heroes have their final showdown with the shark on the open water and we finally see its true, hulking form.

How Jaws changed Hollywood

Image: Universal Pictures

Once the movie was completed, however, Universal knew it had a hit on its hands. Since production delays had forced Jaws to miss its planned December 1974 release, the premiere was moved to June. To make sure it didn’t die in the summer as other movies had in the past, Universal gave the movie an unprecedented $700,000 marketing blitz and made the then-unusual choice to release it nationwide on 409 screens.

That decision changed the movie-making business forever. In its first 10 days, Jaws made over $21 million, and ultimately ended its theatrical run at over $260 million. Two years later, the blockbuster release of Star Wars proved Jaws was not a fluke, and since then, the biggest movies have always come out in summer with a wide, simultaneous release.

Photo: Universal Pictures

Jaws is also just a fantastic movie that still holds up. Again, because of the sparing use of the shark, the film is full of tension, which builds and builds until the exciting showdown aboard Quint’s fishing boat. Spielberg’s story was made all the more spectacular by three captivating lead characters. Brody is a complex, conflicted man who is interestingly unsure of himself at times. Dreyfuss is fun to watch as Hooper for the humor and earnestness he brings. And Shaw is an incredibly entertaining scene-stealer as the grizzled Quint. Honestly, one of the best scenes of the entire movie — when the three of them are getting drunk and comparing scars — has almost nothing to do with their current hunt. It's just a scene about three interesting characters bonding over a drink. But it's the final showdown aboard the boat — on that vast, open ocean — that takes the movie from a good story to an all-out experience.

For all of these reasons, Jaws is far more than some 51-year-old piece of Hollywood history. It’s still a remarkably scary, fun, tense, entertaining movie that is as exciting to watch today as it was back in 1975. It’s the kind of movie you can watch again and again and never tire of. And now it's all the easier to watch if you’ve got a Netflix subscription.

Jaws is available to stream on Netflix.