Jaws, Star Wars and the Birth of the Blockbuster

On Martha's Vineyard in the summer of 1974, a mechanical shark named Bruce refused to work. The hydraulics seized in the salt water; the twenty-five-foot monster sank, floated crooked, or simply died on cue. A twenty-seven-year-old director named Steven Spielberg watched his shoot balloon from a scheduled fifty-five days to roughly a hundred and fifty-nine, and his budget from about four million dollars to some nine. Universal executives circled. And Spielberg, forced by a broken machine to keep the shark offscreen, discovered what the malfunction gave him for free: terror is worse when you can't see it. John Williams's two-note bass figure did the work the rubber shark couldn't.

When Jaws opened on June 20, 1975, it did not creep into a handful of prestige houses the way big pictures traditionally had. Universal put it on more than 400 screens at once and spent lavishly on national television advertising — a saturation strategy still faintly disreputable, the mark of a cheap film that needed to grab its money before word got out. Instead Jaws became the first film to cross 100 million dollars in North American rentals. People went back a second and third time. The summer, once a dumping ground where studios buried weak titles while audiences were at the beach, suddenly looked like the richest real estate on the calendar.

The end of the auteur's decade

To understand why this landed so hard, remember what the previous era had left behind. The late 1960s and early '70s belonged to the American New Wave — the film-school generation and their European-influenced elders making dark, personal, morally complicated pictures. Bonnie and Clyde, The Godfather, Chinatown, Taxi Driver, Nashville. Studios, chastened by the collapse of the old system and a string of bloated roadshow flops, had handed unusual power to directors. As the film historian Peter Biskind later chronicled in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, it was a brief window when the filmmakers, not the executives, held the reins — and the art was extraordinary.

Jaws did not kill that cinema so much as reveal a more lucrative alternative running right alongside it. The man who finished the revolution was Spielberg's friend and fellow movie brat, George Lucas. Coming off the melancholy period piece American Graffiti, Lucas wanted to make a Flash Gordon serial for a generation raised on Vietnam and Watergate. Twentieth Century-Fox barely understood the project. What Lucas understood, and what would prove more valuable than any single film, was leverage: he accepted a relatively modest directing fee in exchange for keeping the sequel rights and, crucially, the merchandising rights. Fox thought it was giving away nothing.

A galaxy far, far away, and a licensing empire

Star Wars opened on May 25, 1977, on a mere 32 screens, because exhibitors were skeptical. Within weeks lines wrapped around city blocks. It expanded, and expanded, and became the highest-grossing film released to that point, dethroning Jaws itself. But the theatrical gross was only the visible part. Kenner's action figures — so back-ordered that Christmas of 1977 that the company sold "Early Bird" certificates, empty boxes promising toys that didn't yet exist — turned a science-fiction movie into a self-replenishing consumer machine. Bedsheets, lunchboxes, novelizations, a Marvel comic, a platinum-selling soundtrack. Lucas's merchandising gamble made him, over the decades, one of the wealthiest men in the industry, and it taught every studio in town a permanent lesson: the film could be the trailer for everything else.

Together the two pictures defined a new grammar of the business, one that governs it still:

"I have a bad feeling about this."

The line, recurring across the Star Wars saga, became a wink at exactly the kind of built-in familiarity the new model prized. High concept was the phrase of the age — a movie you could pitch in a sentence and sell on a poster. The wide release paired with a saturation TV campaign became standard. The summer tentpole was born, and behind it the sequel and the franchise: Jaws 2 in 1978, then The Empire Strikes Back in 1980, widely held to be the rare sequel that surpassed its original. Where the New Hollywood auteurs had made films that ended, the blockbuster made worlds that continued.

Conglomerates, effects, and the machine

The timing was not accidental. Through the 1960s and '70s the old family studios had been absorbed into conglomerates — Gulf and Western swallowed Paramount, the Kinney conglomerate took Warner Bros., MCA sat atop Universal. To corporate owners answering to shareholders, a personal three-hour character study was a poor bet next to a four-quadrant picture that sold toys, spawned sequels, and opened on a thousand screens. The blockbuster was not merely an artistic turn; it was the film that made sense on a balance sheet, and the conglomerate structure rewarded it relentlessly.

It also launched an arms race in spectacle. To realize his star destroyers and dogfights, Lucas founded Industrial Light and Magic in 1975, and it spent the next two decades reinventing what a camera could show. Its motion-control rigs and, later, digital breakthroughs — the water pseudopod in The Abyss (1989), the liquid-metal assassin of Terminator 2 (1991), and above all the photorealistic dinosaurs of Spielberg's Jurassic Park (1993) — pushed computer-generated imagery from novelty to industry standard. By the time Titanic became the first film to gross a billion dollars worldwide across 1997 and 1998, and The Phantom Menace arrived in 1999 as a digital-effects showcase, the tentpole logic Spielberg and Lucas invented had hardened into the operating system of Hollywood.

None of this meant the ambitious cinema of the previous decade simply vanished; the two men themselves kept making formally daring work, and the '90s would nurture a new independent scene at the margins. But the center of gravity had shifted for good. The film was now a platform — for sequels, licenses, theme-park rides, and the endless reissue of the same beloved worlds.

What no one in 1977 could have named was the destination. The franchise machine that Kenner's empty boxes and Fox's discarded rights set in motion would, a generation on, be consolidated under a handful of corporate owners and organized into interlocking "cinematic universes" that treated individual movies as episodes of a larger, unending serial. The wide release would meet the multiplex, the home-video cassette, and eventually the streaming library. That is the story of the era to come. It begins here, on a New England beach, with a broken shark that taught a young director the value of what you cannot see — and a space opera whose real fortune was hiding in a contract clause everyone else ignored.