10 Dead Movie Franchises That Hollywood Must Revive
3. Jaws
Shark movies are all the rage at the moment. Giant prehistoric sharks, sharks in tornados, ghost sharks, flying Nazi sharks. You can’t pick up and throw a shark in Hollywood without it landing on a low rent production company remaking BMX Bandits with sharks, or trying to land an eighties pop star to front Killer Zombie Sex Sharks From Mars.
That’s why there’s never been a better time for a return to the definitive shark attack franchise. Roy Scheider and Robert Shaw may have passed on, but Richard Dreyfuss is still going strong: however this isn’t necessarily about returning to the old characters.
What we need is a bare bones, chillingly effective movie that riffs off the original but matches it for sustained, cold deep sea dread and ups the ante for set-pieces. No ridiculous gimmicks: Jaws wasn’t a monster movie, but a slasher flick where the masked guy with the knife lurking in the shadows, was a twenty-five foot long Great White shark.
And if you’re stuck for a hook that connects it to the first film: well, there’s always that conspiracy theory that says that the huge maneating shark that’s killed at the end of Jaws had actually been terrorising the east coast of America for years.
A seventies-set prequel ending in the official cover-up that leads into the events of Jaws itself? I’ll buy into that.