These classic creature features prove you don’t need a shark for a great Jaws movie

polygon.com:

On June 20, 1975, the release of Jaws revolutionized the way Hollywood sold movies to the American public. Its marketing innovations have been documented so exhaustively that most students of film history can recite them by heart. Jaws was the first movie to benefit from a television ad campaign. It opened in 465 theaters simultaneously, bucking the historical strategy of slow, targeted rollouts, and it practically invented the summer blockbuster, smashing box office records at a time when conventional wisdom held that late June was a moviegoing dead zone.

Steven Spielberg’s first masterpiece ushered in a golden era of mainstream filmmaking. It also opened the door for an avalanche of blatant knockoffs, from major studios and underground producers alike. An exceptional trio of films from that initial wave of post-Jaws aquatic creature features — 1977’s Orca, 1978’s Piranha, and 1980’s Alligator — put plenty of blood in the water, but they also delivered on stranger, more subversive ambitions. They’re all available to watch at home, and they’re all worth your time, decades later.

When producer Dino De Laurentiis saw Jaws, he told screenwriter Luciano Vincenzoni (The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly) to “find a fish tougher and more terrible than the Great White.” Vincenzoni came back with Orca, a script in which a killer whale dispatches a great white shark in the opening sequence. That made for a gloriously unsubtle metaphor, but any notion of taking down Jaws was wishful thinking — Orca was a critical laughingstock and a notorious box office flop for Paramount. With the benefit of 45 years of hindsight, it’s clear that its biggest sin was that it wasn’t a meticulous re-creation of its main inspiration. Directed by Michael