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Months after Jaws debuted in June 1975, the thriller became the highest-grossing film of all time. Critics still classify the blockbuster by director Steven Spielberg as one of the most influential films in film history.
However, Spielberg says he’s still worried about another legacy from “Jaws.” In an interview with BBC Radio released on Sunday, Spielberg said he feels responsible for the decimation of shark populations in the decades since the film’s release.
“I’m still afraid … that sharks are kind of mad at me for the mad swordfish feeding frenzy that happened after 1975,” said Spielberg, 76.
“I’m really, really sorry about that,” he added.
According to a study published by Nature, the global population of sharks and rays declined by more than 71 percent between 1970 and 2018. A 2013 study estimated there were 100 million sharks are killed annually. Last year, the International Union for Conservation of Nature said 37 percent of sharks and rays are threatened with extinction.
Some say that “Jaws” influenced this downtrend. Chris Lowe, director of the shark laboratory at California State University Long Beach, told the film led to people viewing sharks as vicious towards humans.
“‘Jaws’ was kind of a turning point,” Lowe said. “That made people think very negatively about sharks, which made them so much easier to overfish.”
Over the years, researchers have documented some of the negative portrayals of sharks in films like Jaws. A 2021 study concluded that 96 percent of shark films depicted the shark animals as threatening. Last year, the Florida Museum of Natural History reported that sharks killed 11 people worldwide.
Gavin Naylor, who directs Florida’s shark research program, said Spielberg may be too critical of himself. While Naylor notes that “Jaws” sparked interest in sharks, he believes people would have fished and sold them anyway.
“I don’t think he should feel awful for getting everyone to fish for them commercially,” Naylor said. “There was a reaction to the film from a few people who just wanted to catch some sharks. But that was long before ‘Jaws’.”
Spielberg had directed other projects before Jaws, but the film was his first blockbuster. At the age of 27, Spielberg adapted Peter Benchley’s best-selling novel. The film follows residents of a New England beach town as they hunt a great white shark that kills swimmers. Jaws grossed $100 million in 59 days and later surpassed The Godfather as the world’s highest-grossing film, a record it held until the release of Star Wars two years later.
Since then, Spielberg has produced dozens of acclaimed films, including ET the Extra-Terrestrial, Jurassic Park, and Schindler’s List. Still, he said the legacy of “Jaws” bothered him.
“I really regret, and to this day, the decimation of the shark population,” Spielberg told the BBC, “because of the book and the film.” (Benchley, who wrote the “Jaws” novel, said in 2000 that he was also in somehow responsible for the suffering of the great white sharks.)
Lowe said he believes “Jaws” provoked the proliferation of shark fishing tournaments. When other species were threatened with extinction in the 1980s, Lowe said, people overfished sharks with little opposition from the public.
“It made it easier for people to say, ‘You know what? These things are a threat,” Lowe said. “The word ‘shark’ had that connotation, and people were less compelled to protect them.”
Naylor agrees that “Jaws” increased the popularity of sharks, including the demand for shark fin soup in the 1990s. But he said “Jaws” had become the scapegoat for a problem that humans have created.
“People have been fishing for sharks for a long time,” Naylor said. “And they’ve been afraid of sharks for a long time.”
But Lowe said stereotypes surrounding sharks are diminishing. For the past decade, he said, most of his students have been doing shark research to protect them.
“I don’t think it’s having the same impact it has on my generation,” Lowe said of Jaws. “They start to see it like, ‘Okay, well, that was more entertainment and less about really educating us about what sharks are really about.'”