Box office
Jaws opened in 409 theaters with a record $7 million weekend[139] and grossed a record $21,116,354 in its first 10 days[140] recouping its production costs.[141] It grossed $100 million in its first 59 days from 954 playdates.[142] In just 78 days, it overtook The Godfather as the highest-grossing film at the North American box office,[127] sailing past that picture's earnings of $86 million,[143] and became the first film to earn $100 million in US theatrical rentals.[144] It spent 14 consecutive weeks as the number-one film in the United States.[145] Its initial release ultimately brought in $123.1 million in rentals.[141] Theatrical re-releases in 1976 and Summer 1979 brought its total rentals to $133.4 million.[143]
The film entered overseas release in December 1975,[146] and its international business mirrored its domestic performance. It broke records in Singapore,[147] New Zealand, Japan,[148] Spain,[149] and Mexico.[150] On January 11, 1976, Jaws became the highest-grossing film worldwide with rentals of $132 million, surpassing the $131 million earned by The Godfather.[151] By the time of the third film in 1983, Variety reported that it had earned worldwide rentals of $270 million.[152] Jaws was the highest-grossing film of all time until Star Wars, which debuted two years later. Star Wars surpassed Jaws for the U.S. record six months after its release and set a new global record in 1978.[153][154]
Across all of its releases Jaws has grossed $476.5 million worldwide;[155] adjusted for inflation, it has earned almost $2 billion at 2011 prices and is the second-most successful franchise film after Star Wars.[156] Including its 2022 reissue, it has grossed $265.8 million in the United States and Canada,[155] equivalent to $1.2 billion at 2020 prices (based on an estimated 128,078,800 tickets sold),[157] making it the seventh-highest-grossing movie of all time adjusted for ticket price inflation.[158] In the United Kingdom, it is the seventh-highest-grossing film to be released since 1975, earning the equivalent of over £70 million in 2009/10 currency,[159] with admissions estimated at 16.2 million.[160] Jaws has also sold 13 million tickets in Brazil, a quantity first surpassed by Titanic in 1998, and that still ranks as the sixth most attended film in the country.[161][162]
On television, ABC aired it for the first time on November 4, 1979, right after its theatrical re-release.[163] The first U.S. broadcast received a Nielsen rating of 39.1 and attracted 57 percent of the total audience, the second-highest televised movie audience at the time behind Gone with the Wind and the fourth-highest rated.[164][165] In the United Kingdom, 23 million people watched its inaugural broadcast in October 1981, the second-biggest British TV audience ever for a feature film behind Live and Let Die.[166]
Critical reception
Jaws received mostly positive reviews upon release.[167][168] Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film four stars, calling it "a sensationally effective action picture, a scary thriller that works all the better because it's populated with characters that have been developed into human beings. It's a film that's as frightening as The Exorcist, and yet it's a nicer kind of fright, somehow more fun because we're being scared by an outdoor-adventure saga instead of a brimstone-and-vomit devil."[169] Variety's A. D. Murphy praised Spielberg's directorial skills, and called Robert Shaw's performance "absolutely magnificent".[170] According to The New Yorker's Pauline Kael, it was "the most cheerfully perverse scare movie ever made ... [with] more zest than an early Woody Allen picture, a lot more electricity, [and] it's funny in a Woody Allen sort of way".[171] For New Times magazine, Frank Rich wrote, "Spielberg is blessed with a talent that is absurdly absent from most American filmmakers these days: this man actually knows how to tell a story on screen. ... It speaks well of this director's gifts that some of the most frightening sequences in Jaws are those where we don't even see the shark."[172] Writing for New York magazine, Judith Crist described the film as "an exhilarating adventure entertainment of the highest order" and complimented its acting and "extraordinary technical achievements".[173] Rex Reed praised the "nerve-frying" action scenes and concluded that "for the most part, Jaws is a gripping horror film that works beautifully in every department".[174] David Thomson wrote that "like Coppola on The Godfather, Spielberg asserted his own role and deftly organized the elements of a roller coaster entertainment without sacrificing inner meanings. The suspense of the picture came from meticulous technique and good humor about its own surgical cutting. You have only to submit to the travesty of Jaws 2 to realize how much more engagingly Spielberg saw the ocean, the perils, the sinister beauty of the shark, and the vitality of its human opponents."[175]
Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote, "It's a measure of how the film operates that not once do we feel particular sympathy for any of the shark's victims. ... In the best films, characters are revealed in terms of the action. In movies like Jaws, characters are simply functions of the action ... like stage hands who move props around and deliver information when it's necessary". He did describe it as "the sort of nonsense that can be a good deal of fun".[176] Los Angeles Times critic Charles Champlin disagreed with the film's PG rating, saying that "Jaws is too gruesome for children, and likely to turn the stomach of the impressionable at any age. ... It is a coarse-grained and exploitative work which depends on excess for its impact. Ashore it is a bore, awkwardly staged and lumpily written."[177] Marcia Magill of Films in Review said that while Jaws "is eminently worth seeing for its second half", she felt that before the protagonists' pursuit of the shark the film was "often flawed by its busyness".[178] William S. Pechter of Commentary described Jaws as "a mind-numbing repast for sense-sated gluttons" and "filmmaking of this essentially manipulative sort"; Molly Haskell of The Village Voice similarly characterized it as a "scare machine that works with computer-like precision. ... You feel like a rat, being given shock therapy".[172] The most frequently criticized aspect of the film has been the artificiality of its mechanical antagonist: Magill declared that "the programmed shark has one truly phony close-up",[178] and in 2002, online reviewer James Berardinelli said that if not for Spielberg's deftly suspenseful direction, "we would be doubled over with laughter at the cheesiness of the animatronic creature."[83] Halliwell's Film Guide stated that "despite genuinely suspenseful and frightening sequences, it is a slackly narrated and sometimes flatly handled thriller with an over-abundance of dialogue and, when it finally appears, a pretty unconvincing monster."[179]
Accolades
Jaws won three Academy Awards, those being for Best Film Editing, Best Original Dramatic Score, and Best Sound (Robert Hoyt, Roger Heman, Earl Madery, and John Carter).[75][180] It was also nominated for Best Picture, losing to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.[181] Spielberg greatly resented the fact that he was not nominated for Best Director.[172]
Along with the Oscar, John Williams's score won the Grammy Award,[182] the BAFTA Award for Best Film Music,[183] and the Golden Globe Award.[184] To her Academy Award, Verna Fields added the American Cinema Editors' Eddie Award for Best Edited Feature Film.[185] The film was voted Favorite Movie at the People's Choice Awards.[186]
It was also nominated for Best Film, Director, Actor (Richard Dreyfuss), Screenplay, Editing and Sound at the 29th British Academy Film Awards,[183] and Best Motion Picture–Drama, Director and Screenplay at the 33rd Golden Globe Awards.[184] Spielberg was nominated by the Directors Guild of America for the DGA Award,[187] and the Writers Guild of America nominated Peter Benchley and Carl Gottlieb's script for Best Adapted Drama.[188]
