The sequels that snatched defeat from the victory of ‘Jaws’

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When “Jaws” became one of the biggest cinematic hits in history in 1975, it was inevitable that producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown would go back into the water. “If we didn’t make it, somebody else would,” Brown said years later of the first follow-up. “We felt very protective of it.”

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This sentiment was not shared by “Jaws” director Steven Spielberg, who publicly dissed sequels as “a cheap carny trick” even while “Jaws” was still packing houses. A decade after the “Jaws” Cycle petered out, Spielberg would agree to direct 1997’s “The Lost World: Jurassic Park” in part because he saw those mediocre-to-abysmal “Jaws” sequels as an unsightly asterisk on his first pop masterpiece.

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The fact that there’s a seventh “Jurassic” movie coming out July 2 but no new sequel or reboot to capitalize on “Jaws” turning 50 is remarkable. The rules of modern IP franchise-building tell us that any blockbuster franchise that quits after four isn’t even trying.

As cinema, none of the three Spielberg-less “Jaws” films come close to the original. But the franchise is worth examining in its chewed-up totality because it encapsulates, in the space of just a dozen years, nearly all the methods and correctives of sequel-making that would become Hollywood’s dominant business model: The Simple Reprise (“Jaws 2”). The Meanwhile, Over Here and Some Years Later (“Jaws 3D”). The Retcon (“Jaws: The Revenge.”). The Legacy Sequel (“The Revenge” again. Universal couldn’t lure “Jaws” star Roy Scheider back for love or money, but Lorraine Gary was available.).

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Each of these models would be refined and perfected in the decades after the “Jaws” trade dried up – your Fridays the 13th, your Nightmares on Elm Street. But those were niche films, with low budgets and lower expectations. “Jaws” tried each of these moves on what was then the world’s biggest stage.

Have the “Jaws” sequels improved with age? Do they have anything to tell us now? I grabbed my harpoon gun and found out.

‘Jaws 2’ (Jeannot Szwarc, 1978)

“Sharks don’t take things personally, Mr. Brody.”

There was some discussion of following “Jaws” with a prequel that would dramatize the 1945 sinking of the USS Indianapolis, as Robert Shaw’s Quint related in his famous monologue in the first film. “2001: A Space Odyssey” co-creator Arthur C. Clarke pitched producers Brown and Zanuck on an idea about a mysterious object somewhere in the Indian Ocean. Both ideas struck Zanuck and Brown as too far removed from the original story, so they opted to just do “Jaws” again, trying to make up for the absence of Quint (shark food) and Richard Dreyfuss’s Matt Hooper (on a research vessel and unreachable, we’re told) by doubling down on Brody family drama.

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When the shark attacks start happening again off of Amity Island and Scheider’s Martin Brody – he of the immortal line, “You’re gonna need a bigger boat” – is disbelieved again, the landlubbing New Yorker starts to spiral, eventually firing his revolver into the ocean on a crowded public beach. He is relieved of his position as chief of police. But any movie cop who stands down after being so ordered is hardly worth the badge he’s already been told to turn in. Brody eventually tricks the predator I’m going to call Jaws Too into chomping into a high-voltage undersea cable and cooking itself, albeit not until after the shark has taken down a helicopter!

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Scheider was by all accounts unenthusiastic about returning, but he’s almost as good here as he was in “Jaws.” Total pro. Jeannot Szwarc, a Frenchman who like Spielberg had directed episodes of “Night Gallery” and “Columbo,” tried to bring some class and color to this no-win assignment. His reward? Szwarc would go on to direct 1984’s “Supergirl” and 1985’s “Santa Claus: The Movie” before returning to Europe and then to television.

Brody sons Mike and Sean are recast, as will become customary. The movie isn’t bad, it just isn’t “Jaws.” Despite the absence of Dreyfuss, “Jaws 2” was still a hit, finishing in the year’s box office Top 10 just behind a movie called, coincidentally, “Hooper.”

‘Jaws III,’ a.k.a. ‘Jaws 3D’ (Joe Alves, 1983)

“You’re talkin’ about some damn shark’s mother?”

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1983, it turned out, was the summer of deflating three-quels, with the who’d-have-thunk-it Richard Pryor vehicle “Superman III” and the critter-filled “Return of the Jedi” preceding “Jaws 3D.” The idea of going fully comedic for the third entry must’ve been in the air. It was certainly in the water: Brown and Zanuck had pitched Universal a spoof they wanted to call “Jaws 3, People 0.”

“The attitude was, ‘You’re fouling the nest. You can’t do this,’” Brown recalled in a making-of documentary included on the “Jaws 2” DVD and Blu-ray. “We should’ve fouled the nest.”

So Brown and Zanuck left the nest-fouling to others. “Jaws” screenwriter Carl Gottlieb was one of the credited writers, and “Jaws”/”Jaws 2” production designer Joe Alves got a big promotion. “Jaws III” would be the only directing credit of his career, but at least he can lay claim to having made the second-best Dennis Quaid/Louis Gossett Jr. pairing of the 1980s.

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That duo played, respectively, a downed space pilot and his male-and-pregnant extraterrestrial opponent in “Enemy Mine,” and this third “Jaws” is almost as good as that. The slow shots designed to capitalize upon the 3D gimmick stick out like a severed thumb … or the severed arm the camera lingers on following the movie’s first shark attack, 14 minutes in.

Remarkably, this wasn’t just shot at SeaWorld – the park is identified by name in the film, anticipating the lesson of the more robust “Jurassic Park” series: There really is no such thing as bad publicity. Chief Brody is nowhere to be found, so the action focuses on Fabulous Brody Boys Mike and Sean. Now played by Quaid and John Putch, they look to have aged 15 years in the five since the last sequel. Quaid has said he was on cocaine in “every frame”; whatever the case, his performance is the best one in the movie.

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Still, there are more tasty crumbs. Putch’s hydrophobic Sean Brody pursues a romance with water-skier Lea Thompson two years before “Back to the Future,” and Brit Simon MacCorkindale is a hilariously patrician hunter named Fitzroyce who becomes determined to trap the great white and kill it on-camera. (“This film is a bloody retirement annuity,” he says.) Eventually we’ll be treated to an inside-the-shark’s-mouth shot of him getting chummed. Plus, Gossett intones phrases like “filtration pipe” with a level of gravitas more commonly associated with sentences like “These wounds I had on Crispin’s day!” (That’s Shakespeare, not sharkspear!)

It’s all building to the moment that comes 91 minutes into a 99-minute movie when Jaws Also bursts through the window of the SeaWorld control room complete with animated glass shards flying out at the viewer. There immediately follows a shot of a large, rubbery shark puppet chomping on an even less lifelike mannequin while some voice actor howls in pain, terror or possibly embarrassment.

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Quaid and his love interest Bess Armstrong, who brings harried second-grade-teacher energy to her role as a dolphin-loving marine biologist, get a happy reunion with their two dolphins, and the movie ends on a freeze-frame, something no prior “Jaws” picture dared to attempt.

‘Jaws: The Revenge’ (Joseph Sargent, 1987)

“Maybe he had a heart attack. Too much bloody food! Humans are full of cholesterol, you know!”

“A Joseph Sargent Film” is the only above-title credit in this sad quickie, which at least suggests some pride in authorship. Sargent, another TV veteran, worked another 20 years after this, but “Jaws: The Revenge” was his last theatrically released feature. It’s a shame, because he made a handful of really good movies, including the A.I. cautionary tale “Colossus: The Forbin Project” and the Robert Shaw-starring “The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3.”

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This one is set at Christmas, an odd tonal shift that feels even weirder than the choice to retcon away the events of “Jaws 3D.” Now we’re told that the Brodys stayed in Amity after Martin’s death of a heart attack instead of going back to New York. We’re not quite nine minutes into the movie when Sean Brody, now a police deputy, gets his arm bitten off by a great white that pops up like a jack-in-the-box. He screams in agony and terror for a full minute before he dies, his pleas for help crosscut with a choir singing “The First Noel.” This is a mean-spirited film.

“It waited all this time and it came for him,” Ellen Brody tells Mike, her surviving son, now played by Lance Guest. The tagline told us as much: “This time, it’s personal.”

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After Sean’s death, Mike invites his mom to join him and his family down in the Bahamas, where he’s some sort of oceanographic researcher. His partner in this enterprise is Mario Van Peebles, doing a faux Bahamian accent in his role as Jake. He gives his buddy Mike a loud button-up for Christmas and says, “May your sex life be as busy as your shirt.”

A Bahamas location shoot prevented new cast member Michael Caine (!!!) from collecting his Academy Award for “Hannah and Her Sisters” in person. He plays a pilot called Hoagie, inviting the question of why every latter-day “Jaws” player is not named after a sandwich. He’s also the love interest of the Widow Brody.

“I knew a one-armed piano player once,” Hoagie jokes in a New Year’s Eve party scene. “It took him two minutes to play the minute waltz!” A couple at the table laugh and Ellen’s reaction suggests she has either been spared the knowledge or simply forgotten Sean had his arm severed before he was killed half an hour earlier.

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Lots of films get new endings after test screenings, but “The Revenge” actually got one after it had already been released in U.S. cinemas. Originally, Ellen impaled Jaws the 4th on the bowsprit of a boat, causing her waterborne stalker to bleed to death. This was considered too prosaic an end for “a” shark that had been exploded, electrocuted and exploded in the prior films, so a revised finale was slotted in for the international and home video versions. This time, Ellen punctures the great white with the prow of the boat and it explodes, honouring the family tradition. There’s no compressed air tank stuck in its mouth this time, just the famously combustible combination of water, wood and sharkskin.

“Jaws: The Revenge” was the sole entry in the series to end its theatrical run in the red. It was 1987’s 51st-highest-grossing release, just behind “Nuts,” a drama starring Barbra Streisand and Hooper himself, Mr. Dreyfuss.

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Caine’s comment about his “Revenge” experience has echoed down the decades just like the movie’s tagline: “I have never seen the movie, but I have seen the house it paid for, and it’s fabulous.”

Sequels were still a different equation when the “Jaws” machine bit its last. In the old calculus, they were expected to do a fraction of their forebears’ business. Sequels that actually expanded their audiences, often by a significant multiplier – 1989’s “Lethal Weapon 2,” 1990’s “Die Hard 2: Die Harder,” 1991’s “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” – would soon follow, each taking advantage of their prior film’s home-video/premium cable afterlife, a leg up “Jaws” never really had. But two of those three were from the original film’s director, and all of them managed to reunite the principal cast. And of course, each of those franchises eventually let quality control slip, delivering at least one truly benighted entry.

Just not as bad as “Jaws: The Revenge.”

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