Last Sunday marked the return of a pastime as American as apple pie: Shark Week.
The increasingly silly stretch of special programming has now graced our televisions for 37 years. That's a longer TV run than The Simpsons.
Credit is surely due for some Discovery Channel junior executive in 1988 who presumably dodged their drug test long enough to deliver this pitch, but that’s only part of the story. Fervor for sharks had truly begun 13 years earlier and 50 years from this summer, when a young, wunderkind filmmaker named Steven Spielberg introduced himself to the nation with what would become its first modern blockbuster, Jaws (1975).
The movie follows a new police chief in a beach town in New York who is greeted by the sudden appearance of a gargantuan, man-eating, great white shark off its shore, forcing him to assemble a small team to sail out to see and hunt it down.
If you're reading this, I probably don’t need to explain the film’s cultural significance. A tidal wave of content for the 50th anniversary of the film's debut has been flooding the internet for months, mostly stories we've heard before. The longer time passes, though, the wider our aperture into the past expands, revealing effects we might’ve missed when they began, discovering new consequences, or finally answering a long-standing question. My personal revelation this summer was a question that remains unanswered.
Where are the other good shark movies?
Please don't start with me. I don't want to hear why Jaws 2 (1978) is sneaky underrated, or how Deep Blue Sea (1999) is a cult classic, or why Open Water (2003) was actually even scarier than Jaws. No. Stop it. Those are cute movies, but there has never been a film so prolifically and unsuccessfully replicated in American history, with outcomes ranging somewhere between "unwatchable" and "at least keep watching until Samuel L. Jackson gets eaten!"
That level of sustained mediocrity seems unfathomable, unless there's something else going on here. What if Jaws is that rare type of film, so impactful, that it leaves a permanent impression on culture broadly, and audiences can no longer sit through another film of that genre without directly comparing it. A cascading effect takes hold, and our young, up-and-coming filmmakers today are either intimidated by the idea of putting their own spin on a genre with such a towering pinnacle, or they revere it too much to even try. The film becomes a genre killer, and Jaws isn't the only one with a resume impressive enough to be considered for the title.
Scream (1996): The Self-Aware Slasher
Americans love serial killers. It's not a controversial statement given the state of entertainment offerings today, but the fascination had to start somewhere. At the cinema, movie-goers' obsession with crazed murderers was already simmering by the time Norman Bates plunged a kitchen knife into a shrieking, showering woman in Psycho (1960).
Audiences were horrified...and tantalized. They wanted more. They needed more and, in 1978, they got more. John Carpenter’s Halloween birthed the modern “slasher” and since then, it's become one of the most reliable movie genres out there, generating more than $2.5 billion at the U.S. box office and spawning countless sub-genres. Multiple slasher or slasher-adjacent films hit theaters yearly. The formula for a slasher was so simple that it became the focal point of one of the most fascinating slasher sub-genres to ever emerge.
In the mid-1990s, Wes Craven had a weird idea. He wanted to debate the phenomenon of slasher movies...inside a slasher movie. The final product was Scream (1996), which chronicles an all-time week from hell for a small town high school student who starts getting stalked by a serial killer dressed in a generic Halloween costume. That killer also might’ve been involved in the murder of the student’s mother exactly one year earlier. The plot mixes equal parts horror, mystery, and satire to create a recipe that felt entirely unique at the time- that of the "self-aware slasher"- and audiences couldn't wait to gobble it up. After a disappointing opening weekend in theaters, Scream went from box office bomb to slasher sensation in a matter of weeks, riding the "word of mouth" wave to $100 million at the U.S. box office.
As with Jaws, there was a mad dash in Hollywood to replicate the success of Scream. I Know What You Did Last Summer debuted just 10 months later to terrible reviews. Scream 2 was rushed into production and hit theaters just 357 days after the original. Studios oversaturated the market, and audiences eventually revolted. The self-aware slasher faded as a sub-genre. Unlike Jaws, however, Scream likely owes part of its "genre killer" status to its sequels. All five of them have earned cinema scores no worse than a 'B-' and have also been extremely profitable. In a way, Scream didn't kill a genre; it became the genre.
Starship Troopers (1997): Pure Satire
There's no movie on this list that would intrigue me more if it had come out today than Starship Troopers (1997). The sci-fi action epic is also the only film on the list that was an outright flop. The plot unfolds in a future when a united Earth is at war with an alien race of giant insects. We follow a young soldier who goes from the frontlines of the fight on the bugs' home planet to a lieutenant commander and war hero. Initially, the movie bombed at the box office.
The film was a passion project for Dutch filmmaker Paul Verhoeven. Critics were baffled. Why would the man who brought us Robocop (1987), Total Recall (1990), and Basic Instinct (1992) suddenly decide to make a trashy knockoff of a novel that’s chock-full of fascist ideology and blatant propaganda?
Verhoeven had finally made a satire so effective that no one realized it was a satire. This seems unfathomable in today’s world, and the several decades of filmmaking that followed Starship Troopers back that up. No satire of this magnitude has even sniffed box office relevancy since 1997. The combination of the movie’s masterful execution, the mass-misunderstanding that followed, and the natural evolution of culture might’ve proven so toxic, that studios and filmmakers haven't bothered trying again.
Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (2000): Martial Arts
My favorite moment in a basketball game is when a player performs so well for a stretch that they start to believe they’re just too “hot” to miss. So, they test that theory by jacking up an extremely ill-advised shot. It's called a “heat check,” and it doesn’t always happen, but when it does, it’s one of the most exciting moments of the game because, succeed or fail, the result is spectacular.
Filmmakers also love a good heat check, but when a director really goes for it, the stakes are ratcheted. Blowing a heat check in a film can torpedo both the film and the filmmaker. Don’t tell that to Ang Lee, the Taiwanese auteur who has made a career off heat check movies, perhaps none more so than the martial arts epic Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (2000).
An ode to wuxia, the genre of Chinese fiction involving martial artists, Lee refuses to hold our hand as he brings to life the mystical elements of ancient Chinese legends. Warriors wield otherworldly powers, floating like the wind up walls or onto tree tops and paralyzing their enemies with a few precise finger strikes. Elements like that could turn a masterpiece into a meme if mishandled, but Crouching Tiger dazzled movie-goers and became an international phenomenon.
The film grossed $128 million domestically, was Oscar-nominated, and carved out a permanent spot in the zeitgeist. It was such a sensation, no martial arts film has been able to step out of its shadow. Today, it’s still the highest-grossing foreign language film domestically by more than double the gross of the second-place film. Lee might've broken down all the barriers ahead of him, but burned the bridges behind in the process.
Borat (2006): The Mockumentary
If you're over 35, the word “mockumentary” conjures rich memories. Baby boomers and Gen Xers might first think of Woody Allen’s Zelig (1983) or Rob Reiner’s This is Spinal Tap (1984). Millennials grew up during the Golden Age of the genre when Christopher Guest reigned supreme, churning out beloved mocks like Waiting for Guffman (1996) and Best in Show (2000). If you’re under 35 and someone says “mockumentary,” you reply “MY WIFE!” That's because the history of the mockumentary can be divided into two eras: Before Borat and After Borat.
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006) was written and starred Sacha Baron Cohen, who was already a cult hero and veteran of satirical storytelling. Once this film hit theaters, though, Cohen became a household name overnight. The movie follows a fictional Kazakh journalist traveling across America and it hyper-charged genre tropes, delivering fearless shock humor and spawning countless quotables that are still instantly recognizable.
At the box office, Borat shattered Best in Show’s record for lifetime gross for a mockumentary ($18.7 million)…in its first weekend ($26.4 million). Nearly two decades later, the only mockumentary since 2006 to crack the top 15 all-time highest-grossing of the genre was Brüno (2009), Cohen’s highly anticipated follow-up feature, but even that failed to garner half the domestic total of what will surely be his magnum opus.