"We Need Summer Dollars" - "Jaws" Debuts in Theaters
With the release of director Steven Spielberg’s Jaws in movie theaters on June 20, 1975, the Summer Movie Season was born.
Film critic Peter Biskind said of Jaws that it “diminished the importance of print reviews, making it virtually impossible for a film to build slowly finding its audience by dint of mere quality. Moreover, Jaws wet corporate appetite for big profits quickly, which is to say studios wanted every film to be Jaws.”
It's hard to believe but in the decades preceding that summer of 1975, the movie industry didn't view the summer season as a prime time to release movies. After all, if so many people were spending their time outdoors - at beaches, bar-b-ques, and vacations - who in their right mind wanted to sit inside in a movie theater?
Drive-ins during the summer were a significant source of revenue for the studios and theaters. However, most of the movies released to drive-ins were "B" movies (low-budget Westerns, sci-fi, and horror). Disney re-issued classic animated features during the summer. Before air conditioning was prevalent in most homes, movie theaters would advertise air conditioning as a draw of coming to see a movie ("It's Cool Inside!").
Movie studios saved their big movie releases for spring, fall, and the Christmas seasons, as they believed moviegoers looked to those times of year to go to the movies.
Jaws changed all of that.
It was an eagerly awaited movie because it was based on a best-selling novel by Peter Benchley, which had just been published the year before in 1974. However, the film's producers, Richard Zanuck and David Brown, along with Universal, were brilliant and savvy.
Here was a movie set during the summer, about summer, about swimming at the beach. And they positioned it to come out just as summer was starting.
The marketing team at Universal also wisely used television to promote Jaws, flooding the airwaves with commercials. This included about two dozen 30-second advertisements airing each night in prime time.
Additionally, Jaws wasn't released to theaters like other films of the time that would open slowly in cities and then spread out to neighborhood theaters. Jaws opened everywhere on June 20, 1975, so that anyone and everyone who wanted to see it could.
Jaws made $7 million during its opening weekend (a record at the time) and grossed a record $21,116,354 in its first 10 days (recouping production costs of the troubled shoot on Martha's Vineyard).
It grossed $100 million in its first 59 days and surpassed The Godfather as the highest-grossing film at the North American box office in just 78 days. Jaws also became the first film to earn $100 million in the U.S.
Moviegoers waited in line to see the film, then told their friends and neighbors, who also waited in line to see it. Jaws became the conversation.
And, the Summer Movie Season was born.
Suddenly, movie studios realized that people would go to the movies during the warm weather months. They will take a break from vacations and bar-b-ques (and especially beaches, which were noticeably empty thanks to Jaws) to see a movie that everyone is talking about.
Other studios scrambled to get their Jaws, their big blockbuster. Scheduled releases of some of their biggest pictures began to shuffle to get them out in summer, and the search was on for the next big crowd-pleasing blockbuster.
That would come two summers later in 1977 with Star Wars, which sent the Summer Movie Season into hyperspace. And the fifty summers since have seen such blockbusters ranging from Spielberg’s own E.T: The Extra-Terrestrial to Batman and from The Lion King to Independence Day and from The Avengers to Barbie.
And just as Disney always says, "It all started with a Mouse," when it comes to the Summer Movie Season, "It all started with a shark."
That summer of '75, that summer of Jaws, is filled with memories that have echoed through every summer after. And memories of that summer will be shared in Part 5, the conclusion, next week.
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Sources: Wikipedia
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