It ripped apart the rule book

Jaws was the first summer blockbuster, and changed the way films are marketed, writes Michael Dwyer

It started with a shark.

Before Steven Spielberg's Jaws opened in the US during the summer of 1975, it was common practice to release movies on a staggered basis. This would start with exclusive presentations in major cities, and then gradual releases on a wider basis over six months or even longer.

In the pre-Jaws era, summer was regarded as the worst possible time to release a major new movie in the US, not least because cinemas were uncomfortably hot and did not begin to install air-conditioning until the early 1970s. And in those days, the Hollywood studios relied primarily on print advertising to sell their movies to the public.

Jaws tore up the rulebook. It was only the second cinema film directed by Steven Spielberg, a television graduate then in his late 20s. Columbia Pictures, which financed and released Jaws, decided to experiment with the then novel approach of advertising the movie extensively on television, (considered prohibitively expensive at the time), and opening it at far more cinemas than was industry practice then.

The strategy paid off more handsomely than anyone could have dreamed: Jaws became one of the biggest hits in the history of cinema.

"And so it began," commented Columbia's studio chief at the time, Peter Guber, quoting the first four words in the Peter Benchley novel, Jaws. "These wide releases, these enormous expenditures of prints and advertising in publicity and marketing costs and expenditures, would create this enormous swell of momentum that would create gargantuan box office from the beginning."

The massive success of the first Star Wars two summers later copperfastened the policy of creating hi-tech spectaculars for mid-year release, and summer became synonymous with blockbusters - Spielberg's ET and his Indiana Jones (June 1981) and Back to the Future trilogies, Sylvester Stallone's monosyllabic Rambo outings (two of which were released at the start of the summer), and the present governor of California's adventures as The Terminator.

For the best part of two decades, however, US summer releases did not open this side of the Atlantic until Christmas. The advent of video piracy changed all that, and it's now common practice to release summer blockbusters on thousands of prints across the world on the same day they open in the US.

The lucrative formula for making and releasing summer movies has been tooled with cynical precision. The movies are devised as effects-driven audio-visual spectacles that match and exceed the thrills of the most sophisticated theme park rides. With few exceptions, the narratives are so simplistic that the audience can leave their brains in the lobby where they stock up on junk food.

There is no room for failure. Thirty years ago, before Jaws, movies had months to find their audience through word-of-mouth and positive critical reaction. Now they have the opening weekend. If a film does not immediately perform to expectations at the box-office, it can be dropped without hesitation.

This summer has been a chequered season for the blockbuster, although it is far from becoming an endangered species. For 18 consecutive weekends this summer, US box-office returns were down on the corresponding weekends in 2004, prompting masses of analysis and scare stories in the media.

There is a simple explanation. If Mel Gibson's massively profitable The Passion of the Christ is taken out of the equation, US box-office returns are actually a little higher than last summer, and it is widely believed that a very large proportion of the audience that flocked to Gibson's film last year were not regular cinemagoers and had turned out in such numbers for that movie because of its religious theme.

Summer being the silly season, however, the box-office story ran and ran, parallel to the antics of the Hollywood glitterati who delivered in spades for the media seeking a story, any story.

Miles of newsprint were devoted to Tom Cruise's extraordinary declaration of love for Katie Holmes when he was a guest on Oprah Winfrey's TV chat show, and to all the hoopla that ensued before Cruise proposed to Holmes at the Eiffel Tower. By happy coincidence, Cruise and Holmes both had mega-budget summer movies opening within weeks of each other - he in Spielberg's lavish new version of War of the Worlds, she as the token woman in Batman Begins.

As ever, original material was thin on the ground in this summer's cinema fare, which consisted primarily of remakes (War of the Worlds, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, House of Wax, The Perfect Match, Bad News Bears, Dark Water), sequels and series (Star Wars Episode III, Herbie: Fully Loaded, Seed of Chucky), comic book adaptations (Sin City, Fantastic Four) and TV spin-offs (Bewitched, The Dukes of Hazzard, The League of Gentlemen's Apocalypse).

Inevitably, there were rewards for the country's handful of cinemas that offer alternative movies, in particular the Screen complex in Dublin, which enjoyed a highly successful summer with the Hitler movie, Downfall, playing for five months, along with very healthy runs for the quirky US picture, Garden State, and the brooding New Zealand drama, In My Father's Den.

There will be far more movies for grown-ups on show from Friday week, after the schools re-open. Meanwhile, the Hollywood studios are already preparing for next year's blockbuster season, and there's a distinct whiff of déjà vu off the titles scheduled for summer 2006: Pirates of the Caribbean 2, Garfield 2, X-Men 3, Mission Impossible 3, The Fast and the Furious 3, Omen 666, Superman Returns, ...