Hollywood has been chasing the same formula for 50 years.
It all started with one movie that almost never got made.
And Steven Spielberg made one decision that changed Hollywood forever and left studios scrambling to copy him.
The disaster that became a goldmine
Back in 1974, Hollywood thought they had the winning formula figured out.
Three disaster movies with all-star casts were raking in the cash during the last three months of the year.
Airport 1975 earned $47 million, Earthquake earned $79 million, and The Towering Inferno earned $116 million, for a combined total of $242 million, with Charlton Heston somehow managing to star in two of them.
But there was another movie that was supposed to hit theaters during Christmas 1974.
A young director named Steven Spielberg was trying to turn a bestselling novel called Jaws into a movie.
Heston had wanted to star in this one too, but the production was turning into a complete nightmare.
Everything that could go wrong was going wrong.
The mechanical sharks kept breaking down in the salt water.
The script was being rewritten every single day.
Robert Shaw, who played the grizzled shark hunter Quint, was driving his co-star Richard Dreyfuss absolutely crazy on set.
The whole cast and crew were miserable filming in the actual ocean instead of a nice, controlled studio tank.
Universal Studios was probably wondering if they’d made a huge mistake backing this disaster-plagued production.
The gamble that paid off beyond anyone’s wildest dreams
But something incredible happened when Jaws was finally finished.
Universal executives watched the completed film and realized they had pure gold on their hands.
Instead of rushing it into theaters for Christmas, they made a decision that would change Hollywood forever.
They decided to release Jaws in the summer of 1975.
This was revolutionary thinking at the time.
Summer was considered the dead zone for movies back then.
The conventional wisdom was that serious moviegoers stayed away from theaters during the hot months.
But Universal had a different vision.
They poured a whopping $1.8 million into marketing the film – an astronomical amount for that era.
They saturated primetime television with ads like it was a presidential campaign.
They created merchandise ranging from T-shirts to towels.
That iconic poster of a massive shark rising toward a lone swimmer became burned into America’s consciousness.
And John Williams’ terrifying two-note theme – "duh-dum, duh-dum" – became the sound that would haunt beachgoers for generations.
The moment that created the summer blockbuster
On Friday, June 20, 1975, Universal released Jaws on 409 screens across the country.
This was another revolutionary move – most films opened on far fewer screens back then.
By Sunday night, the film had shattered every opening weekend box office record in existence.
Jaws pulled in $7,061,513 in its first three days.
By the end of August, it was playing on twice as many screens and had become a cultural phenomenon.
People were genuinely afraid to go swimming in the ocean.
Saturday Night Live was doing "Landshark" sketches that had Spielberg himself cracking up in the studio audience.
The final tally was absolutely staggering.
While those three disaster movies from 1974 had combined to make $242 million, Jaws made $470 million worldwide all by itself.
Hollywood learned the lesson and never looked back
The success of Jaws didn’t go unnoticed by other studios.
20th Century Fox tried to copy the formula the following year with The Omen and found some success.
But it was Star Wars in 1977 that really proved Jaws wasn’t just a fluke.
Released just before Memorial Day weekend, Star Wars built the same kind of word-of-mouth buzz that had Jaws fans coming back to see it multiple times.
It became the highest-grossing film of all time up to that point.
By the end of the 1970s, summer had become the season for big, crowd-pleasing movies.
Grease, Animal House, The Amityville Horror, and Rocky II all followed the Jaws playbook.
When Alien won the summer box office sweepstakes in 1979, it was clear that Hollywood had completely transformed.
The summer blockbuster was born, and it’s been the industry’s bread and butter for the past 50 years.
The formula that still rules Hollywood today
Every summer, movie studios spend hundreds of millions of dollars trying to recreate what Spielberg accidentally discovered in 1975.
They’re looking for that perfect combination of spectacle, thrills, and mass appeal that can dominate the box office for months.
The marketing campaigns get bigger and more elaborate every year.
The merchandise tie-ins become more extensive.
And audiences keep flocking to air-conditioned theaters to escape the summer heat while getting their adrenaline pumping.
All because a young director refused to film his shark movie in a safe studio tank and a studio executive decided to bet big on summer moviegoing.
Sometimes the biggest disasters lead to the greatest breakthroughs.
And sometimes one movie can change an entire industry forever.