Tag Archives: The State Cinema

Since the dawn of cinema way back when, in a time where people would challenge each other to duels, cats had more rights than women, and people didn’t have cell phones (GASP!), films were made with passion and heart, stories were more character driven, art films flourished, and directors had no use of digital effects so they used their actors to their full potential. This was all fine and dandy until 1975 came. I’ll give you a few clues to what changed cinema: 1. Amity Island 2. Brody 3. A giant great white shark. Ok you got it; we’re talking about “Jaws” here and I’m not going to lie: it’s a great movie, it won a bunch of awards and helped instill fear of the ocean for many people (myself included). But as scary as “Jaws” was, what was scarier was how it almost singlehandedly changed people’s perspective of going to the movie theatre. Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws” cost $8,000,000 to make and had a worldwide box office total of over $470,000,000. With these figures in hand, you can see why film producers realized they stumbled on something huge; it was called the “summer popcorn movie” and it changed cinema as a result.

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