Jaws Rerelease Beats Two New Movies At Box Office And Movie Theaters Need To Take Note

Jaws got a rerelease in movie theaters this weekend in honor of its 50th anniversary, and it took in around $10 million at the box office across 3,200 screens. That secured the iconic film the number two spot for the Labor Day weekend. As expected, Weapons kept the top spot as it continues to prove the power of well-funded and strongly marketed original horror.

But it’s the Jaws rerelease and its box office performance that deserves the discussion this week. If I have anything even remotely approaching followers at this point, they will know that Jaws is the greatest achievement in the history of the cinematic art form. No other motion picture has, or ever will, surpass what Steven Spielberg released into the world in 1975. That’s the reality I’m forced to experience in this prison of pulsating flesh that houses the boundless imagination of my consciousness.

So yes, a Jaws rerelease doing well at the box office doesn’t surprise me at all because Jaws is the best movie ever made. What does surprise me is that two new releases aimed squarely at adult crowds, Caught Stealing and The Roses, couldn’t manage to squeak over the line to beat it. That’s not a judgment call on either of those movies. Rather, it makes me think about what movie theaters need to start concentrating on moving forward.

Restored Classics Deserve The Theater

The Jaws rerelease was the most recent high-resolution restoration of the movie and it looks incredible. It’s rough out there with James Cameron letting Skynet restore his movies to make everyone inhumanly slick, so knowing Jaws has been treated with love and respect in restoration is very refreshing. But it also matters because these kinds of movies deserve to be revisited and discovered in movie theaters.

Jaws is considered the original summer blockbuster movie. It changed the entire distribution model of theatrical exhibition and we’ve never really gotten away from it in fifty years. That alone makes it the kind of movie that should be given a regal rerelease in the biggest and best possible exhibition. Hell, Universal would do well to make sure you can always see a screening of Jaws in the summer and make it a tradition.

That stands to reason with so many classic movies. Through different movie theater chains and distribution outlets, there is a healthy ecosystem of archive screenings happening at any given time. While every movie can’t be Jaws, there are plenty of classics that would do well to get the kind of marketing push that Jaws got for this special anniversary.

And maybe that’s where more of the marketing money needs to be going now.

Market More For Rereleases

I don’t want to rag on Caught Stealing or The Roses. I haven’t seen them and I don’t plan on it. I like the fact they are R-rated movies aimed at adult audiences. I don’t want those to go away at the box office. However, it’s becoming clearer that marketing movies means more than ever in the new age of entertainment. Movies like Caught Stealing and The Roses surely had sizable enough marketing spends (especially The Roses) but they could not beat the beast that is Jaws.

That tells me that if movie studios were willing to spend some real marketing dollars on rereleasing certain movies, they could probably make a hefty profit on a more regular basis. While there are plenty of classics like Jaws that are primed to do well, it would be nice to see movie studios actually embrace a larger swath of their catalogs and market their rereleases as events you don’t want to miss.

If there are movie rereleases playing at a theater near you, you should check them out and go enjoy some! But, it would be nice to see more rereleases given the kind of support we saw for Jaws this Labor Day weekend. It would be nice if you didn’t have to work as hard to know they were available. The movie studios should be spending more money getting your attention about them.