Cinema News: Can ‘Jaws’ at 50 save the sharks?

September 04, 2025 | View in browser

A person holds an eyeball in a jar up against a picture of a shark.

By Rosanna Xia

Staff Writer

Hi there! It's Rosanna Xia, coastal reporter and director of the Los Angeles Times environmental documentary "Out of Plain Sight," filling in for Sammy Roth. For this week's edition of Boiling Point, let's revisit a film that changed the course of ocean history.

I was just on Cape Cod for the Woods Hole Film Festival, and the moment I crossed the Sagamore Bridge, it was impossible not to think about sharks.

This summer marks the 50th anniversary of "Jaws," and with every fan T-shirt, hat and poster seen around town, I was reminded that this blockbuster thriller about a bloodthirsty shark had been filmed right here on Martha's Vineyard. Steven Spielberg even called in experts from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution where the character Matt Hooper, played by Richard Dreyfuss, earned his stripes. (If you need a bigger boat, WHOI's got a few.)

There's been a lot of talk over the years about the "Jaws effect" and how the film sparked a devastating fear of sharks. Shark-killing tournaments exploded in popularity after the film, and there has been little public empathy for the millions of sharks that get killed each year from industrial fishing. The global number of sharks and rays, in fact, has plummeted by more than 70% since 1970, and the great white shark today is a threatened species.

Peter Benchley, who penned the bestselling novel that inspired the movie, later expressed remorse and spent the rest of his life making the case with his wife, Wendy, that sharks are actually crucial to a healthy and stable ocean.

"The shark in an updated 'Jaws' could not be the villain; it would have to be written as the victim, for, worldwide, sharks are much more the oppressed than the oppressors," Benchley wrote in an essay in 1995. "It has been estimated that for every human life taken by a shark, 4.5 million sharks are killed by humans."

But seeing all the renewed excitement for "Jaws" this year made me appreciate the feelings of commonality (and dare I say, hope?) that this cultural phenomenon has brought about. In a year where our politics have become more polarized than ever, this shared fascination with sharks has been a refreshing, less-controversial way to care about the ocean.

"I've been somehow made aware of 'Jaws' every single day this year — and not in a negative way. It's very uniting," said Jaida Elcock, a shark biologist with WHOI's Marine Predators Group who runs @soFISHtication_, a popular animal-facts page on Instagram and TikTok. "Everyone knows this movie, and even if there's sometimes differing opinions, you can strike up a conversation with a stranger just because it's the 50th anniversary of 'Jaws.'"

At a time when even landmark bipartisan environmental laws such as the Marine Mammal Protection Act are under political attack, having a pop culture moment to rally around isn't all that bad. The more we can talk about all the ways we rely on the ocean, the better, especially given the massive budget slashes from the Trump administration that have threatened crucial weather-forecast operations, lifesaving ocean-monitoring research, and painstaking efforts to save the sea's many endangered species. (Remember the baby abalone? Their whole future is also at stake.)

When I called up Chris Lowe for his take, the celebrated director of the Shark Lab at Cal State Long Beach told me "Jaws" played no small part in inspiring his generation of marine scientists.

Lowe, who grew up on Martha's Vineyard, still remembers the summer "Jaws" was filmed in 1974. He was 10 years old, and it felt like the entire island was involved in the movie. His uncle is one of the townspeople who flinch when Quint (the cynical shark hunter played by Robert Shaw) drags his fingernails across the blackboard; his school cafeteria cook made an appearance; and two of his classmates were tapped to play the sons of protagonist Chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider).

The first in his family to go to college, Lowe was fascinated in particular by the scientist character, Hooper. Not quite believing that studying fish could actually be a job, Lowe would take the ferry to Woods Hole and just wander the halls. While others that year developed a fear of swimming, Lowe discovered just how little anyone actually knew about sharks.

"That lack of information allowed the public to scare themselves about sharks," said Lowe, who wondered if the film would even work if it was made today, given what we've since learned about sharks. "Steven Spielberg told that story in such a compelling way that you made the monster in your own mind."

More than 400 million years old, sharks are actually extraordinary. They have outlived five mass extinctions and could teach us a thing or two about surviving in a changing climate. It's also worth noting that great whites are just one of more than 500 shark species — none of which are human-eating terrors. The largest shark in the world, the whale shark, is actually a filter feeder and couldn't swallow you even if it tried.

And although white sharks, tiger sharks and bull sharks do require a humbling dose of caution, the chance of being bitten — as long you don't provoke them — is incredibly low. Last year, there were only 47 unprovoked shark bites across the entire world.

Keep up with California

Your support helps us deliver the news that matters most. Subscribe to the Los Angeles Times.

Subscribe Now

"There's no study, no data I could ever show people, that would be more convincing than to have them be in the water when a baby white shark swims by — and to have that shark not pay any attention to them at all," said Lowe, who has spent years helping people see that there's very little to be afraid of. "It just won't match that picture of what they remember from 'Jaws' or what they saw on 'Shark Week.'"

This fear of sharks also appears to be generational, which speaks to the power of pop culture in shaping where we place our empathy.

"We're the ones entering their homes, not the other way around," said A-bel Gong, a researcher with Minorities in Shark Sciences, a nonprofit co-founded by Elcock. "The real villain in 'Jaws' was the local government that was completely negligent... and then blaming everything on the shark."

Gong, who will be speaking later this month at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures as part of a new exhibit on the film, grew up in the early 2000s watching "Shark Tale" (an animated movie featuring a vegetarian shark) and "Finding Nemo" (in which a great white by the name of Bruce runs a Fish-Friendly Sharks support group.) Many from Gong's generation had never even seen "Jaws" until the buzz this year, and most children today are introduced to sharks through "Baby Shark," whose whimsical "doo doo, doo doo doo doo doo" melody is a far cry from the foreboding "dun dun... dun dun" score of "Jaws."

When I see how "Jaws" has turned into a nostalgic, no-longer-scary movie for people to obsess over today, I think about how whales were once also demonized. We went from hunting whales a la "Moby Dick," to finding them majestic and relatable — and this, too, can be done with sharks. With "pro-shark" sites like The Daily Jaws and retrospectives like the new "Jaws @ 50" documentary fueling the fandom, there's surely enough momentum to turn the tide.

Back at Woods Hole, Camrin Braun, who heads the Marine Predators Group, is also part of an exciting new future for sharks.

Braun is not necessarily a shark scientist, but rather, a scientist who relies on sharks to study a rapidly changing ocean. Using sensors and advanced tracking technology that Hooper's character could only dream of, Braun can now gather data on not only the thousands of miles that a shark might cover — but also sea surface temperature, currents and other critical information. All this data can then be fed into models that help forecast the weather and even predict future shifts in the ocean.

Braun, who's been getting calls all year to talk about sharks, said the excitement has been invigorating. As "Jaws" becomes more unifying than terrifying, we can start to let go of the film's early consequences and take this moment to inspire the next generation of ocean protectors and explorers.

"Forget about the early impacts of 'Jaws,'" Braun said. "It's been really cool to see that, fast forward 50 years, it's given us such a great reason to celebrate sharks."

This is the latest edition of Boiling Point, a newsletter about climate change and the environment in the American West. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. And listen to our Boiling Point podcast here.

For more coastal and ocean stories, follow @rosanna.xia and @outofplainsightfilm on Instagram.