50 YEARS OF JAWS
THE PHENOMENON
TWO YEARS BEFORE STAR WARS, JAWS BIRTHED THE BLOCKBUSTER AS WE KNOW IT
WORDS IAN FREER
Queuing around the block outside the State Theatre,
SEVERAL MONTHS BEFORE Jaws opened, on 20 June 1975, Steven Spielberg, then just 28, sat in a Universal marketing meeting and floated an idea. His proposition involved a range of little chocolate sharks which, when bitten into, would squirt blood, or more precisely, cherry juice. “We’ll clean up,” he excitedly told the assembled suits. The myopic marketeers passed.
Sixty-four days after the film’s debut, when Jaws passed The Godfather to become the then highest-grossing film of all time (eventually earning $478 million worldwide), the executive wonks must have regretted the confectionery kibosh. When the film hit big, Universal scrambled to meet demand, rushing into production licensed merch ranging from T-shirts and shark-teeth jewellery to beach towels and a toilet seat with gnashers. The Universal Studio Store also planned to stock actual shark foetuses contained in small bottles of formaldehyde, until animal-rights activists successfully lobbied to stop the sale.