In the years since its release, Jaws has frequently been cited by film critics and industry professionals as one of the greatest movies of all time.[189] It was number 48 on American Film Institute's 100 Years ... 100 Movies, a list of the greatest American films of all time compiled in 1998; it dropped to number 56 on the 10th Anniversary list.[190][191] AFI also ranked the shark at number 18 on its list of the 50 Best Villains,[192] Roy Scheider's line "You're gonna need a bigger boat" 35th on a list of top 100 movie quotes,[193] Williams's score at sixth on a list of 100 Years of Film Scores,[76] and the film as second on a list of 100 most thrilling films, behind only Psycho.[194] In 2003, The New York Times included the film on its list of the best 1,000 movies ever made.[195] The following year, Jaws placed at the top of the Bravo network's five-hour miniseries The 100 Scariest Movie Moments.[196] The Chicago Film Critics Association named it the sixth-scariest film ever made in 2006.[197] In 2008, Jaws was ranked the fifth-greatest film in history by Empire magazine,[198] which also placed Quint at number 50 on its list of the 100 Greatest Movie Characters of All Time.[199] The film has been cited in many other lists of 50 and 100 greatest films, including ones compiled by Leonard Maltin,[200] Entertainment Weekly,[201] Film4,[202] Rolling Stone,[203] Total Film,[204] TV Guide,[205] and Vanity Fair.[206]
In 2001, the United States Library of Congress selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry, recognizing it as a landmark horror film and the first "summer movie".[207] In 2006, its screenplay was ranked the 63rd-best of all time by the Writers Guild of America.[208] In 2012, the Motion Picture Editors Guild listed the film as the eighth best-edited film of all time based on a survey of its membership.[209]
Jaws was key in establishing the benefits of a wide national release backed by heavy television advertising, rather than the traditional progressive release in which a film slowly entered new markets and built support over time.[115][127] Saturation booking, in which a film opens simultaneously at thousands of theaters, and massive media buys are now commonplace for the major Hollywood studios.[210] According to Peter Biskind, Jaws "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 whet corporate appetites for big profits quickly, which is to say, studios wanted every film to be Jaws."[211] Scholar Thomas Schatz writes that it "recalibrated the profit potential of the Hollywood hit, and redefined its status as a marketable commodity and cultural phenomenon as well. The film brought an emphatic end to Hollywood's five-year recession, while ushering in an era of high-cost, high-tech, high-speed thrillers."[212]
Jaws also played a major part in establishing summer as the prime season for the release of studios' biggest box-office contenders, their intended blockbusters;[127][213] winter had long been the time when most hoped-for hits were distributed, while summer was largely reserved for dumping films thought likely to be poor performers.[212] Jaws and Star Wars are regarded as marking the beginning of the new U.S. film industry business model dominated by "high-concept" pictures—with premises that can be easily described and marketed—as well as the beginning of the end of the New Hollywood period, which saw auteur films increasingly disregarded in favor of profitable big-budget pictures.[127][214] The New Hollywood era was defined by the relative autonomy filmmakers were able to attain within the major studio system; in Biskind's description, "Spielberg was the Trojan horse through which the studios began to reassert their power."[211]
The film had broader cultural repercussions, as well. Similar to the way the pivotal scene in 1960's Psycho made showers a new source of anxiety, Jaws led many viewers to fear going into the ocean.[215][216] Reduced beach attendance in 1975 was attributed to it,[217] as well as more reported shark sightings.[218] It is still seen as responsible for perpetuating negative stereotypes about sharks and their behavior,[219] and for producing the so-called "Jaws effect", which allegedly inspired "legions of fishermen [who] piled into boats and killed thousands of the ocean predators in shark-fishing tournaments."[220] Benchley would later campaign to stop the depopulation of sharks, saying that "Jaws was entirely a fiction".[221] Spielberg later echoed this sentiment, saying that he regretted "the decimation of the shark population because of the book and the film".[222][221] Conservation groups have bemoaned the fact that the film has made it considerably harder to convince the public that sharks should be protected.[223]
Jaws set the template for many subsequent horror films, to the extent that the script for Ridley Scott's 1979 science fiction film Alien was pitched to studio executives as "Jaws in space".[224][225] Many films based on man-eating animals, usually aquatic, were released through the 1970s and 1980s, such as Orca, Grizzly, Mako: The Jaws of Death, Barracuda, Alligator, Day of the Animals, Tintorera, and Eaten Alive. Spielberg declared Piranha, directed by Joe Dante and written by John Sayles, "the best of the Jaws ripoffs".[181] Among the various foreign mockbusters based on Jaws, three came from Italy: Great White,[226] which inspired a plagiarism lawsuit by Universal and was even marketed in some countries as a part of the Jaws franchise;[227] Monster Shark,[226] featured in Mystery Science Theater 3000 under the title Devil Fish;[228] and Deep Blood, which blends in a supernatural element.[229] The 1976 Brazilian film Bacalhau parodies Jaws, featuring a killer cod in place of a shark.[230][231] The 2009 Japanese horror film Psycho Shark was released in the United States as Jaws in Japan.[232] Filmmaker Takashi Yamazaki cited Jaws and Spielberg as an influence for his 2023 Japanese kaiju film Godzilla Minus One.[233]
Richard Dreyfuss made a cameo appearance in the 2010 film Piranha 3D, a loose remake of the 1978 film. Dreyfuss plays Matt Boyd, a fisherman who is the first victim of the title creatures. Dreyfuss later stated that his character was a parody and a near-reincarnation of Matt Hooper, his character in Jaws.[234] During his appearance, Dreyfuss's character listens to the song "Show Me the Way to Go Home" on the radio, which Hooper, Quint and Brody sing together aboard the Orca.
Martha's Vineyard celebrated the film's 30th anniversary in 2005 with a "JawsFest" festival,[235] which had a second edition in 2012.[236] An independent group of fans produced the feature-length documentary The Shark Is Still Working, featuring interviews with the film's cast and crew. Narrated by Roy Scheider and dedicated to Peter Benchley, who died in 2006, it debuted at the 2009 Los Angeles United Film Festival.[237][238]
Shaw's son, Ian Shaw, co-wrote and starred as his father in the play The Shark Is Broken about the making of Jaws, which premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2019 and transferred to the West End in October 2021.[239][240]
On March 24, 2020, it was announced that Donna Feore will direct and choreograph Bruce, the musical retelling of the behind-the-scenes story of Jaws, with Richard Oberacker writing the musical book and lyrics and Robert Taylor working on the music. It was originally set to premiere in June 2021, but was pushed back to June 2022 at the Seattle Repertory Theatre.[241][242]
On November 20, 2020, a replica of the shark, also called "Bruce", was lifted into place at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in preparation for the museum's April 2021 opening. It was expected to be a major attraction. Greg Nicotero spent seven months restoring Bruce, which had been created after the original three sharks were destroyed and was on display for 15 years at Universal Studios Hollywood. Bruce then spent 25 years in a junkyard, until the owner donated the shark to the museum in 2016.[243]
