New Shark Movies Prove Jaws' Success Is Impossible To Replicate

screenrant.com:

With the release of films like 2022's Shark Bite and 2021's Great White, the animal attack subgenre has proven again that the success of Steven Spielberg's Jaws will never be replicated. Jaws was released in 1975 and revolutionized the «man vs. nature» films that started gaining popularity through the 60s and early 70s. The imitators followed quickly, beginning the very next year. Since then, shark attacks films, in particular, have been desperate to recreate the magic that Spielberg conjured in 1975.

While select films, like The Shallows in 2016, have carved their own success out of oceanic Hollywood, an exceptional amount of deep blue blunders have washed ashore in the years between 1975 and 2022. While the aforementioned Shark Bite and Great White were certainly held back by their independent budgets, even large-scale efforts like Jason Statham's The Meg have failed to achieve critical success. In fact, Jaws has been so hard to replicate that its immediate sequel, Jaws 2, also fell short.

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Imitators of the first cinematic shark attack masterpiece have always failed and will continue to do so because no film could hope to replicate the perfect storm of talent, budget, and time that was demonstrated in Jaws. Perhaps the most immediate misstep that's visible in modern shark films is their approach to special effects. Jaws excelled by using practical effects to show a monster that had weight and volume. The cast could interact naturally with the animatronic shark that was used to depict Jaws' antagonist. Recent efforts, due either to the convenience of modern technology or to budget restraints, almost universally apply CGI sharks to their