Universal Pictures Home Entertainment Will Be Celebrating The 50th Anniversary Of Director Steven Spielberg's Jaws On June 17 With Two 4K Ultra HD Purchasing Options

You can never really know if a film is going to become an iconic landmark.   You can count a seemingly endless list of blockbuster theatrical releases over the years that have long since faded from memory.   So box office results can be misleading.

And winning awards, especially the Best Picture Oscar, doesn’t equate to “icon” status either — just take a glance at what members of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences have selected as the recipient of the little gold statue during, oh say, the past fifty years.

Universal Pictures Home Entertainment will be celebrating the 50th anniversary of a film that is — by any standards — iconic!   This would be director Steven Spielberg’s 1975 film adaptation of Peter Benchley’s best-selling 1974 novel, Jaws.

Sure, the book was a massive best-seller, but if you were to look at the film’s pre-production history you might have concluded that — despite the book’s success — Jaws was going to be a train wreck.  

Casting was all over the place, with Richard Dreyfuss actually turning down the part of oceanographer Matt Hooper — can you imagine “The Dude,” Jeff Bridges or the star of Cabaret, Joel Grey, in the role?

And Spielberg, despite having worked for producers Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown previously (Sugarland Express), was not their first choice … they actually hired then fired director Dick Richards (The Culpepper Cattle Co.).

The film went over-budget and was behind schedule … and “Bruce” was nothing but trouble (that was the various shark models used in the film).

Despite all of the movie-making issues (often a messy process to be sure), when the lights dimmed in theatres nationwide on June 20, 1975 and John Williams’ music (officially the “Theme from Jaws”) began playing it was all cinema magic … 124 minutes later audience were absolutely terrified to go anywhere near a beach in the summer of 1975.   That’s ICONIC!!!

Yes, Jaws was nominated Best Picture, but at least it lost to a worthy competitor, Once Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest … unlike Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan in 1998 (that bit of nonsense has become a decade’s long embarrassment for the academy).

On June 17, almost fifty years to the day of the film’s theatrical debut, Universal Pictures Home Entertainment will be releasing two 4K Ultra HD/Blu-ray Combo Pack purchasing options, including a limited edition SteelBook.

Bonus nuggets include deleted scenes, outtakes, documentary filmmaker Laurent Bouzeraeu’s 1995 feature-length documentary, The Making of Jaws and there is the newly-prepared “documentary” titled Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story (filmmaker not specified … might be an extended featurette).

There are also three featurettes — “From the Set,” “Jaws: The Restoration” and “The Shark is Still Working: The Impact and Legacy of Jaws” — and a Jaws archive which includes storyboards, production photos and more.