15 Bloody Facts About the ‘Jaws’ Sequels

In 1975, Steven Spielberg and Universal Pictures changed movies forever with the release of Jaws. Still considered by many to be the first summer blockbuster, the film broke box office records, frightened audiences, and made Spielberg an A-list director. 

But it wasn’t the end. The moment executives at Universal saw the Jaws box office receipts, they set out with a goal to capture more of that coin, and the Jaws sequels were born. 

Though none are remembered as fondly as the original, each of the three sequels released between 1977 and 1987 has something to offer fans of the series, whether it’s as a direct sequel, an underwater adventure, or just as some good old-fashioned creature-feature schlock. 

In celebration of the 50th anniversary of Jaws in 2025, let’s have a look at 15 facts about all the official sequels—including Jaws 2 (1978), Jaws 3-D (1983), and Jaws: The Revenge (1987)—plus one spoof that never came to light.

1. 6 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Jaws 2
2. 3 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About the Third Jaws Film
3. 6 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Jaws: The Revenge

6 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Jaws 2

Jaws 2 began while Jaws was still in theaters.

Though Steven Spielberg went famously over-schedule and over-budget during the production, Jaws paid off for Universal Pictures in an unprecedented way when it hit theaters in June 1975.

By August, the film was doing so well that producer Richard D. Zanuck joined then-president of MCA/Universal Sid Sheinberg—also Spielberg’s mentor—in focusing on the potential for a sequel. Just weeks after Jaws hit theaters, as it was still taking massive bites out of audiences everywhere, Zanuck and fellow producer David Brown started reaching out to potential writers.

Jaws 2 was originally pitched as a prequel.

Zanuck and Brown first offered the Jaws 2 writing job to Carl Gottlieb, who co-wrote the original film with Jaws novelist Peter Benchley. Having just penned a huge hit for Universal, Gottlieb backed out when he felt the money involved in his deal wasn’t good enough, believing that producers would eventually realize what they were missing and hire him back.

Instead, Zanuck and Brown approached Howard Sackler—a shark enthusiast and playwright then best known for The Great White Hope—who’d done uncredited rewrites on the Jaws script. Without a Benchley book to fall back on as source material, Sackler fixated on the famous speech about the shark attack at the U.S.S. Indianapolis, which is given by Quint (Robert Shaw) in the original film. Sackler pitched Zanuck and Brown a Jaws prequel that would expand on that story and the development of Quint as a future shark hunter. 

Unfortunately for Sackler, it was Sheinberg who had the final call as the head of the studio. The writer pitched him the idea, but Sheinberg insisted that the film needed to be a direct sequel, set once again on Amity Island, and not a trip back in time. And fortunately for Gottlieb, he turned out to be right: He was called back in to do rewrites for Jaws 2 as it progressed further down the development stream, and was paid “more than twice” what he’d previously been offered.

Roy Scheider didn’t want to do Jaws 2, but got an offer he couldn’t refuse.

Though the story of Jaws 2 was indeed a direct sequel that would require the involvement of Amity Police Chief Brody, Roy Scheider was reluctant to reprise the role. He went off to make other major movies, including Marathon Man in 1976 and Sorcerer in 1977, in an effort to create “distance” between himself and the long shadow of Jaws.

But the studio had Scheider in a corner, because in the late 1970s, he was still under contract at Universal and obligated to do two more films for them. He claimed to have “learned a great deal” in the aftermath of Jaws’s release and knew that the studio’s strategy was to send him scripts they knew he’d reject, over and over, until he finally agreed to make the Jaws sequel to satisfy the terms of his contract. 

But Scheider’s holdout also paid major dividends: By keeping Universal at bay as long as he did, the actor was able to cut a deal in which the studio agreed that Jaws 2 would fulfill the entirety of the remaining two-picture deal, giving him freedom once the sequel was done. That, plus a big pay bump and the promise of “points” on the film’s earnings (something none of the original Jaws cast got), was enough to convince him to play Brody one more (and only one more) time.

Jaws 2 returned to Martha’s Vineyard, where some residents wanted it gone.

Much of the principal photography for Jaws 2 would be handled in Pensacola and Navarre Beach, Florida, where the water was clearer and the fishing season didn’t crowd the ocean with boats. But to keep the Northeastern tone of the original film, the production also returned to the Massachusetts island of Martha’s Vineyard, where the small fishing village of Edgartown was once again a stand-in for Amity. 

Production on Jaws had been a major financial boon for Martha’s Vineyard. While local officials were expecting yet another influx of Hollywood money for the sequel, not everyone was so happy to see film crews crowding the island again.  According to Ray Loynd’s 1978 book The Jaws 2 Log, many residents were happy to have the business Jaws 2 brought, but others rebelled. When the crew arrived in June of 1977, two years after Jaws hit theaters, some Martha’s Vineyard locals printed t-shirts that read “Universal Go Home” and “Jaws Bites.” Others refused the use of their property for shooting locations, even turning down financial compensation. 

The original Jaws 2 director was fired after 18 days of shooting.

Hancock had similarities to a pre-Jaws Spielberg and was known for making acclaimed films on a smaller scale. The feeling between Zanuck and Brown was that Hancock would prove to be another young gun who could make the leap into summer blockbuster territory. But it quickly became apparent that this wasn’t the case. Hancock was involved in Jaws 2 for more than a year, and even worked on rewrites of the script with his wife, actress Dorothy Tristan, after John Sackler departed but before Carl Gottlieb was brought back in for rewrites. 

Once production got underway, though, Zanuck and Brown quickly realized their handpicked director wasn’t up to snuff. The “in over his head” Hancock was fired after less than three weeks of shooting, and the production took a break that stretched to more than a month in order to find a replacement and rework the production. All of Hancock’s Martha’s Vineyard footage from those three weeks in the summer of ’77 was eventually reshot. 

Steven Spielberg almost swooped in to rescue Jaws 2. 

While Universal sorted out its Jaws 2 issues, Steven Spielberg was busy finishing up his follow-up film, the 1977 sci-fi epic Close Encounters of the Third Kind, for Columbia Pictures. According to David Brown, though, he had his ear to the ground when it came to the sequel to his breakthrough film. Once Hancock was fired, he reached out.

Thinking that Spielberg’s return would be a slam dunk for the studio, and armed with the knowledge that Spielberg had also reached out to Sheinberg about the project, Brown got ready for negotiations—but there were problems. Spielberg wanted to make his own revisions to the Jaws 2 script, and his contract with Columbia meant he couldn’t officially start shooting for a year. 

Brown and Zanuck couldn’t wait—they were saddled with a cast and crew waiting on standby for weeks. Spielberg has a slightly different version of events, in which he merely considered work on the film rather than outright offering his services. The director told interviewers that he spent the July 4th holiday in 1977 going over various possible stories for the sequel, and simply decided that he couldn’t make it work to his satisfaction, and backed away. 

Whatever went down, Spielberg ultimately didn’t direct Jaws 2. After considering various options, including original Jaws editor Verna Fields stepping in to direct Jaws 2, producers settled on Jeannot Szwarc, a television director primarily known for his work on shows like Night Gallery.

3 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About the Third Jaws Film

Jaws 3-D was originally pitched as a spoof.

Production difficulties aside, Jaws 2 was a box office success when it was released in the summer of 1978, leaving Zanuck and Brown with the opportunity to push the franchise even further. When the idea of Jaws 3 came up, though, the producers weren’t interested in a straightforward sequel. Instead, they wanted a Jaws spoof, and called in comedy experts at National Lampoon to work out a story they’d dubbed Jaws 3-People 0. 

Matty Simmons, who was the publisher of the National Lampoon at the time, had overseen its rise from a magazine to a multimedia empire and even produced Animal House (1978) along the way. Simmons devised a story that would have followed a director trying to make a fictional version of Jaws 3, only to find that real sharks were constantly attacking him. Simmons brought in future National Lampoon’s Vacation creator John Hughes and writer Todd Carroll to write the script, but trouble soon emerged.

Steven Spielberg himself shot down Jaws 3-People 0.

According to Simmons, Spielberg himself convinced Sheinberg and the rest of the Universal brass to back out of the idea, claiming he’d never work with the studio again if the spoof was made. 

The ultimatum proved fatal for the comedy, and everyone, including Zanuck and Brown, moved on. Universal forged ahead with an alternate idea for Jaws 3-D, capitalizing on the renewed 3D movie craze of the early 1980s, and brought in Jaws and Jaws 2 production designer Joe Alves for his first—and only—directorial project.

Dennis Quaid was on cocaine throughout Jaws 3-D.

Without Roy Scheider returning as Chief Brody, Jaws 3-D shifted focus to his oldest son, Mike, played by Dennis Quaid. In the film, Mike is working at SeaWorld Orlando (where much of the film was shot) as an engineer designing its new underwater walkways and observation decks. Everything seems to be fine until a shark is accidentally let into the park, killing guests left and right.

Jaws 3-D was a chance for a young Quaid to play a starring role in a major movie franchise. But like so many other movie stars in the early ’80s, it was also a chance for him to do a lot of cocaine. Quaid reflected on his substance use during the period back in 2015 to Andy Cohen on Watch What Happens Live. After being asked which of his films had the biggest “cocaine budget,” the actor revealed that Jaws 3-D was perhaps the height of cocaine usage on film sets for him, and that he can tell in “every frame” that he was high. 

In another interview, Jaws 3-D producer Rupert Hitzig confirmed Quaid’s story, and added that the actor was far from alone. “Yes, I believe we are all guilty,” Hitzig said. “It flowed, in Southern Florida, like snow, and the suppliers just wanted to be part of the fun, so they contributed to the drug use.”

6 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Jaws: The Revenge

Jaws: The Revenge was announced without a script or even a story.

Though it did modestly well at the box office, Jaws 3-D was critically panned when it arrived in July of 1983, and for three years, it seemed like it would be the end of the franchise. 

Then, in 1986, Sid Sheinberg had an idea. According to The Shark is Roaring: The Story of Jaws: The Revenge writer Paul Downey, it was potentially inspired by the box office receipts from James Cameron’s 1986 sci-fi hit, Aliens. Either way, Sheinberg wanted to revive the Jaws franchise in a big, character-driven way that could also potentially include his wife, Lorraine Gary, who’d played Ellen Brody in the first two Jaws films. 

To pull the idea off, Sheinberg hired director Joseph Sargent, a veteran filmmaker who’d already made the 1974 classic The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, and gave Sargent free rein to get to work. Sargent then hired writer Michael De Guzman to come up with a screenplay. De Guzman was shocked to find that Sheinberg had already taken out a two-page ad in Variety for the upcoming film, then titled Jaws ’87, to hit theaters the next summer, giving the film a production time of only about nine months. 

The original idea for a fourth Jaws film was very, very different.

Jaws: The Revenge, as envisioned by Sargent and De Guzman, follows Ellen Brody as she leaves Amity behind after the death of her husband and her youngest son, Sean, who is killed by a great white shark, in a dark echo of what happened to the Brody family before. 

She moves to the Bahamas—where great whites don’t usually roam—to be close to her oldest son, Mike (Lance Guest), who’s working as a marine biologist, only to find that one great white seems to have inexplicably followed her. It’s a plot that ignores the events of Jaws 3-D, but retains a little bit of the structure of a modern legacy sequel, in that it focuses on the Brody family and the trauma that still haunts them from Jaws and Jaws 2.

That said, it wasn’t the first Jaws 4 pitch. A couple of years earlier, a writer named Steve De Jarnatt was asked by Universal’s then-head of production, Frank Price, to come up with a sequel idea that would revive the franchise. De Jarnatt ended up pitching a wild story featuring a beachside Renaissance Festival in California, a shark the size of a Megalodon, and more. 

A fistfight between executives killed the original Jaws 4 idea.

So what happened to De Jarnatt’s idea? According to The Shark is Roaring, Price and Sheinberg did not get along, and things went from bad to worse when Price oversaw two box office failures for the studio, Legal Eagles and Howard the Duck, both released in 1986. 

The tension culminated, according to De Jarnatt, in a fistfight between the studio head and the head of production. At the end of it all, in September 1986, Price was fired, and the projects he was developing were canned along with him. It was then that Sheinberg turned to Sargent, and the story took a more down-to-Earth approach … kind of.

The director agrees the premise is silly.

Jaws: The Revenge is, to this day, considered one of the worst sequels of all time and one of the worst major releases of the 1980s. 

There are a number of reasons for this, but a key factor is the premise, wherein it slowly dawns on Ellen Brody that a great white shark is taking revenge on her family. But very specifically, it’s doing it for the death of another great white shark, which was killed by her husband more than a decade earlier. The film leans hard into this idea, giving The Revenge an almost supernatural flavor that, in the end, Joseph Sargent realized was a silly idea.

“It’s a preposterous premise, but at the time we were kind of fired by the possibilities of OK, it’s a stretch but it may set off some sparks and Sid Sheinberg was thrilled with it,” Sargent said in a later interview. “He said, ‘This sounds like a good, fresh way to go about it, thank you very much, go on.’ ”

Despite the production team’s commitment to the idea, audiences simply did not agree, and Jaws: The Revenge became the last film in the series to date, earning less than $52 million worldwide, as well as the worst reviews of the franchise.

Michael Caine bought his mother a house thanks to Jaws: The Revenge.

The infamy of the fourth Jaws film is perhaps best summed up by an oft-repeated quote from co-star Michael Caine, who once said, “I have never seen the film, but by all accounts it was terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific.” 

But what house did Caine build with the Jaws: The Revenge money he earned? In the spring of 2025, The AV Club’s Tim Lowery did some digging to see if the “terrific house” claim was real or just a pithy remark, and discovered that Caine actually confirmed the story in an appearance on the Australian chat show Andrew Denton’s Interview in 2019, revealing that he bought a house not for himself, but for his mother. 

“I was paid a million dollars for two weeks’ work,” Caine said. “And with that money, I bought her the house. Someone said to me, ‘I saw that Jaws 4. It stinks.’ I said, ‘I haven’t seen it, but I’ve seen the house it bought my mother, and it’s marvelous.’” 

Steven Spielberg didn’t return for Jaws sequels, but other original creators did.

Apart from his brief flirtation with returning to the director’s chair for Jaws 2, Steven Spielberg moved on from the franchise that made him a household name, directing numerous other blockbusters over the ensuing five decades. 

But Spielberg, Robert Shaw (whose character died in the first film), and Richard Dreyfuss (who was working on Close Encounters and couldn’t return for Jaws 2), are actually standouts in this regard. In one way or another, most of the other original creatives returned for at least one more outing with the shark. Of the original cast and creators, the most enduring franchise veterans proved to be Lorraine Gary, who played Ellen Brody in three films; Carl Gottlieb, who worked on the scripts for the first three films; and Joe Alves, who was the production designer on Jaws and Jaws 2 and ended up directing Jaws 3-D. 

Other returning faces for the sequels included composer John Williams (Jaws 2), Roy Scheider (Jaws 2), Mayor Vaughan actor Murray Hamilton (Jaws 2), Deputy Hendricks actor Jeffrey Kramer (Jaws 2), and ensemble actors Fritz Jane Courtney (Jaws 2 and Jaws: The Revenge), Cyprian R. Dube (Jaws 2 and Jaws: The Revenge), and Lee Fierro (Jaws: The Revenge). 

Additional Sources: The Shark is Roaring: The Story of Jaws: The Revenge by Paul Downey (2022)

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