Movies
Spielberg Still Thinks About Future of ‘Jaws’ Franchise
With Jaws celebrating its 36th anniversary, AICN‘s Eric Vespe (aka Quint) recently got to chat with the man himself, Steven Spielberg, about the film and his career in general. We got a tidbit from the interview last week, when word got out that the Blu-ray is in the works without any sort of digital alterations (!), and now you can read the interview in its entirety right here.
Jaws is easily one of the most memorable films of all-time and it’s always been assumed that Spielberg was asked to come back for the sequel (which he turned down because hates shooting at sea). He moved onto greener pastures and left the franchise, but it seems as thought the shark that refused to work is always on his mind.
When asked about how he would have approached making a sequel, Spielberg responded, “No, no idea at all, but I have a very, very good scene which I thought would have been good for a sequel someday, which I will tell you someday because I don’t want it in print. But I’ll tell you my scene some day. Every time I think of this scene I think, ‘Hmmm, could this be another Jaws movie?’ and I have to immediately stop myself and immediately pull myself back down to Earth.”
Now, the odds of him actually returning is probably slim to none, but the world would certainly be a better place for it. Each of the three follow-ups Universal made during the late 70’s and 80’s are either unwatchable or unintentionally hilarious (check past the break for the alternate ending of Jaws: The Revenge to see what I mean), and seeing him return would at least end the franchise on a sweet note – and not one that sounds like a mentally challenged lion.
Universal has been having a hell of a time getting their Universal Monsters brand back on a better path in the wake of the Dark Universe collapsing, with four movies thus far released in the years since The Mummy attempted to get that interconnected universe off the ground.
First was Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man, to date the only post-Mummy hit for the Universal Monsters, followed by The Last Voyage of the Demeter, Renfield, and now Abigail. The latter three films have attempted to bring Dracula back to the screen in fresh ways, but both Demeter and Renfield severely underperformed at the box office. And while Abigail is a far better vampire movie than those two, it’s unfortunately also struggling to turn a profit.
Where does the Universal Monsters brand go from here? The good news is that Universal and Blumhouse have once again enlisted the help of Leigh Whannell for their upcoming Wolf Man reboot, which is howling its way into theaters in January 2025. This is good news, of course, because Whannell’s Invisible Man was the best – and certainly most profitable – of the post-Dark Universe movies that Universal has been able to conjure up. The film ended its worldwide run with $144 million back in 2020, a massive win considering the $7 million budget.
Given the film was such a success, you may wondering why The Invisible Man 2 hasn’t come along in these past four years. But the wait for that sequel may be coming to an end.
Speaking with the Happy Sad Confused podcast this week, The Invisible Man star Elisabeth Moss notes that she feels “very good” about the sequel’s development at this point in time.
“Blumhouse and my production company [Love & Squalor Pictures]… we are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” Moss updates this week. “And I feel very good about it.”
She adds, “We are very much intent on continuing that story.”
At the end of the 2020 movie, Elisabeth Moss’s heroine Cecilia Kass uses her stalker’s high-tech invisibility suit to kill him, now in possession of the technology that ruined her life.
Stay tuned for more on The Invisible Man 2 as we learn it.
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