Fifty years ago today, on Friday 20th June 1975, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws opened on 464 screen across North America and not only made Spielberg the hottest director in Hollywood, but it also created the summer blockbuster (a Hollywood scheduling fixture for the last five decades), gave John Williams his second Academy Award (3 of his 5 Oscars are Spielberg collaborations) and not only broke the record for the highest domestic opening box office weekend ($7m) but also became the first film to gross $100m in North America and ultimately became the highest grossing film globally of all time until Star Wars passed it in 1978.
Famously, when Star Wars reeled in Bruce to become the all-time box office champ, Spielberg sent the now infamous message to his great friend.
On June 20, Jaws opened across North America on 464 screens—409 in the United States, the remainder in Canada. The coupling of this broad distribution pattern with the movie’s then even rarer national television marketing campaign yielded a release method virtually unheard-of at the time. (A month earlier, Columbia Pictures had done something similar with a Charles Bronson thriller, Breakout, though that film’s prospects for an extended run were much slimmer, and it is today a common misconception that Jaws was the first to use an ad saturation strategy.) Universal president Sid Sheinberg reasoned that nationwide marketing costs would be amortized at a more favorable rate per print relative to a slow, scaled release. Building on the film’s success, the release was subsequently expanded on July 25 to nearly 700 theaters, and on August 15 to more than 950. Overseas distribution followed the same pattern, with intensive television campaigns and wide releases—in Great Britain, for instance, Jaws opened in December at more than 100 theaters
