When John Hughes Wrote an Unmade ‘Jaws’ Movie

In 1979, film producer David Brown had a thought that seemed terrifically out of character for Hollywood: He believed doing a second sequel to Jaws was a bad idea.

Brown and partner Richard Zanuck had helped usher in the blockbuster era with 1975’s Jaws, the oceanic creature feature based on the Peter Benchley bestseller and directed by Steven Spielberg. A sequel, 1978’s Jaws 2, had brought back Roy Scheider’s police chief Martin Brody for another shark battle. But Brown and Zanuck feared a third movie based on the simple premise—a shark terrorizing a vacation town—would lead to diminishing returns. Or, as Brown said, “[it] might have been a little much.”

The solution: Produce a sequel-slash-satire under the auspices of the National Lampoon brand. Brown and Zanuck teamed up with Lampoon producer Matty Simmons for the idea, which would become one of the more intriguing what-if projects in Hollywood history: Jaws 3, People 0.

1. The Great White Way
2. Jaws 3, Studio 0

The Great White Way

The impact of Jaws remains a milestone in Hollywood. At the time of its release, it was the most successful film in history and the first to earn over $100 million in ticket sales. (The record would stand for two years, until 1977’s Star Wars.) It ultimately landed at $260 million. Adjusted for inflation, that’s over $1.5 billion, more than enough to put it among the highest-grossing films of all time.

Universal, which distributed the film, wanted a sequel. (Spielberg thought about taking part but ultimately declined.) It was another massive hit, grossing $208 million worldwide. But unlike the film franchises of today, which can easily reach eight, nine, or 10 entries, there was some reluctance on Universal’s part to pursue a third film.

In 1978, while Jaws 2 was filling theaters, audiences were also flocking to National Lampoon’s Animal House (often shortened to Animal House), a raucous college comedy co-starring Saturday Night Live star John Belushi. That film made $141 million domestically, an all-time record for a comedy, and helped push the Lampoon brand—which originated as both a Harvard humor magazine as well as a national periodical—into the mainstream. Lampoon executive Matty Simmons already had a deal with Universal, which had distributed Animal House. One day, Simmons ran into Brown on the studio lot.

“What do you think of this for a movie?” Brown said. “Jaws meets Animal House?”

“I hate it,” Simmons replied.

Simmons, who passed away in 2020, remembered it differently, explaining in the Shudder documentary Sharksploitation that the “first thing [Brown] said to me was, ‘Dick and I would love to make a movie with you guys.’ So, out of the blue, I just started kidding around, I just said, ‘Jaws 3, People Nothing.’ ”

However it originated, Universal was excited about the idea. Simmons recruited two Lampoon magazine writers, John Hughes and Tod Carroll, to write a script. (Hughes would go on to a celebrated writing and directing career with hits like National Lampoon’s Vacation and Pretty in Pink, but he had no produced screen credits yet.)

Simmons’s idea was to turn the making of a Jaws film into a meta comedy. That was fleshed out by Hughes and Carroll, who concocted a plot in which rival executives at the fictional Mecca Studios are jockeying for corporate positions. After one executive is killed by a shark—a tragedy seemingly orchestrated by his enemy—his will stipulates that a friend of his named Erma Gurning from Idaho come in to assume his executive role. Her son, Sonny, is hired to finish directing a Jaws sequel plagued by real shark attacks. The turmoil has already caused one director, “Steven,” to quit the project; Sonny’s rewriting of the movie-within-a-movie depicts the offending shark as being from outer space.

As the script [PDF] progressed, Simmons, Brown, and Zanuck started assembling a cast. Stephen Furst, who was best known as Flounder from Animal House, would play a down-and-out actor; a young actor named Rodger Bumpass would play Sonny, the amateur director; Bo Derek, a sex symbol who had just had a hit with the comedy 10, was eyed to play an actress. Simmons also hoped to get Richard Dreyfuss, who played Martin Hooper in the first Jaws, to play a devious producer.

Simmons also had a director in mind: Joe Dante, who had recently finished the low-budget Roger Corman movie Piranha, another killer fish story. Dante—who had yet to make a major studio film—agreed.

The film wasn’t a studio pipe dream: Universal made a formal announcement of the project in April 1979. Hughes and Carroll reportedly went through six drafts of the script in as many months. Simmons would later recall Brown was predicting $100 million at the box office.

But Universal never put the script into production. The reason for that depends on who’s doing the explaining.

Jaws 3, Studio 0

One of the earliest sources of tension on Jaws 3, People 0 was nudity. Simmons and the Lampoon brand were pushing for an R-rated comedy, with scenes featuring topless women. But the first two Jaws films were PG, and Universal did not like the idea of keeping younger viewers of the franchise locked out of theaters.

Had that been resolved, a larger issue loomed. Universal didn’t find the script was evolving into anything particularly good. “The script didn’t work,” Ned Tanen, then-president of Universal, told The Los Angeles Times in 1979. Reportedly, producers Zanuck and Brown felt the first draft was promising. After two drafts, one Times source said, “there were still no laughs.” By the sixth draft, studio enthusiasm had cooled.

Indeed, a contemporary review of Jaws 3, People 0 doesn’t reveal anything that lives up to the memorable title. The opening scene sees the book’s author, Peter Benchley, eaten by a shark in his own swimming pool. By the end, a shark is standing upright next to a “catch” of a studio executive. It’s bizarre but somewhat inert.

Simmons was defensive about Universal's decision. He had spent over a year developing the movie and thought the script was worth making. “It’s very difficult for a humorist to do business with a studio sitting in judgment about what is not funny, especially when they’re not humorists,” he told the Times.

There may have been other issues at play beyond the subjective humor of the script. Even if Jaws 3, People 0 had been a critical and commercial success, there was the possibility it could render the Jaws franchise toothless. “I almost made Jaws 3, People 0,” Joe Dante said in 1981. “But Universal decided not to do it because they didn’t want to make a laughingstock out of the shark. It might have been the end of the sequels, and Universal couldn’t afford to have that happen.”

Though Simmons floated the idea of taking the spoof elsewhere, nothing ever came of it. Instead, the Lampoon brand went ahead with National Lampoon’s Movie Madness, a commercial dud. Universal made Jaws 3D, a 1983 sequel that took the shark to SeaWorld via some crude optical 3D effects. The studio produced just one more sequel, 1987’s Jaws: The Revenge, before putting the franchise on ice. Given the premise of that film—one that sees a great white somehow nursing a personal grudge against Chief Brody’s widow—Jaws fans might have gotten their shark comedy after all.

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