Jaws: The Revenge

As MCA Universal was going through a difficult period, its CEO Sidney Sheinberg saw that a third sequel to Jaws was likely to make a good profit, following the commercial success of Jaws 3-D, despite generally attracting negative reviews.[4] Sheinberg also saw an opportunity to promote the Jaws ride at Universal Studios.[4]

The studio fast-tracked Jaws: The Revenge into production in September 1986 so that it could be released the following summer.[4] Steve De Jarnatt had been approached from Universal's Head of Production Frank Price about writing the script for Jaws IV, as it was then known as. De Jarnatt's script, however, was shelved when Price resigned in September 1986 following the disappointing performance of Howard the Duck.[11] Around this time, Sheinberg approached Joseph Sargent about directing the film.[12] Sargent had worked with Lorraine Gary in 1973's The Marcus-Nelson Murders, for which he won his first Directors Guild of America Award.[13] Indeed, Steven Spielberg cites this television film, which later spawned Kojak, as motivation for casting Gary as Ellen Brody in the original Jaws film, in addition to the fact she was the wife of the studio's chief executive Sidney Sheinberg at that time.[14] Regarding Revenge, Gary remarked in an interview: "I made a good deal on this film, but I didn't make as good a deal as I would have if I weren't married to Sid."[15]

In an interview with the Boston Herald, Sargent called Revenge "a ticking bomb waiting to go off", saying that... MCA Inc. president Sid Sheinberg "expects a miracle." Sheinberg asked Sargent to direct the film in late September 1986. According to Sargent, Sheinberg "cut through all the slow lanes and got Jaws: The Revenge off and running."[16] In a 2006 interview, Sargent stated that the premise was born "out of a little bit of desperation to find something fresh to do with the shark. We thought that maybe if we take a mystical point of view, and go for a little bit of ... magic, we might be able to find something interesting enough to sit through."[17][16]

Sargent hired Michael De Guzman to write a script, within five weeks, with the shooting script being completed during production.[18][4] According to the writer, they had the "bare bones of a story" by October 1986, and by the 2nd November they had a workable outline for the production team.[19] The first draft was completed in mid-December,[19] and the final draft of the screenplay was dated 23 January 1987, just nine days before filming began in Edgartown.[20]

The film was developed under the working title Jaws '87, but by February 1987, the title Jaws: The Revenge was being used.[21] The colon within the title is used by some sources[22] although the colon is not included in the film's opening credits, or on the poster.

The film has no continuity from Jaws 3-D. In its predecessor, Mike is an engineer for SeaWorld, whereas in Jaws: The Revenge, he is a marine research scientist.[23] One of the Universal press releases for Jaws: The Revenge refers to this fourth film in the series as the "third film of the remarkable Jaws trilogy."[24] The underwater chase scene between Mike and the shark in Revenge was lifted from an early screenplay draft of Jaws 3-D.[25] De Guzman's script featured a cameo by Matt Hooper, while the producers still hoped to recruit Richard Dreyfuss to the project.[26]

It was proposed that Martin Brody be the shark's first victim.[27] When Roy Scheider was unavailable, Sargent reports that his character had been dead for 18 months "when we enter the story... and deal with Ellen Brody's emotional problem--her obsession with the death of another member of her family."[28] For De Guzman, it "is a story of obsession and fear. Whether what Ellen Brody has in her mind is true or not will be left up to the audience to decide. No statement is being made in that regard... but it's about any kind of fear so great and so strong that it begins to take control of a human being's life."[28]

De Guzman and Sargent were inspired by the first film's "less is more" approach. Replicating the idea of the yellow barrels in the original, they believed that having the shark swallow meat attached to a sonar device, emitting the sound of the shark's heartbeat, would create tension and be more effective than constantly seeing the shark or people being eaten. De Guzman asserts that the strongest characters in drama are often those off-screen, another justification for not showing the shark too often.[29] Sargent expected the audience to appreciate what they tried to do, and had ambitions that it would not be seen as "a tired version of the first one."[29]

Lorraine Gary portrayed Ellen Brody in the first two films. In a press release, Gary says Jaws: The Revenge is "also about relationships which ... makes it much more like the first Jaws." This was Gary's first film role since she had appeared in Spielberg's 1941 eight years earlier, as well as being her final film role. The press release proposes that the character "had much more depth and texture than either of the other films was able to explore. The promise of further developing this multi-dimensional woman under the extraordinary circumstances ... intrigued Gary enough to lure her back to the screen after a lengthy hiatus."[30]

Gary is the only principal cast member from the original film who returned. Roy Scheider and Richard Dreyfuss refused to participate.[27] Scheider had other commitments, and also had clearly expressed a desire not to play the character again.[28] Lee Fierro made a brief cameo as Mrs. Kintner (the mother of Alex Kintner who was killed in Jaws), as did Fritzi Jane Courtney, who played Mrs. Taft, one of the Amity town council members in both Jaws and Jaws 2. Cyprian R. Dube, who played Amity Selectman Mr. Posner in both Jaws and Jaws 2, is upgraded to mayor following the death of Murray Hamilton, who played Larry Vaughan, the mayor in the first two Jaws films.

Gary states that one of the reasons she was attracted to the film was the idea of an on-screen romance with Oscar winner Michael Caine.

The first day we were to work together I was nervous as a school girl. We were shooting a Junkanoo Festival with noisy drums and hundreds of extras. But he never faltered in his concentration and he put me completely at ease. It was all so natural. He's an extraordinary actor – and just a nice human being.[30]

Caine had mixed feelings about both the production and the final version. He thinks that it was a first for him to be involved with someone his own age in a film. He compares the relationship between two middle-aged people to the romance between two teenagers. Although disappointed not to be able to collect an Academy Award because of filming in the Bahamas, he was glad to be involved in the film. In the press release, he explains that "it is part of movie history ... the original was one of the great all-time thrillers. I thought it might be nice to be mixed up with that. I liked the script very much."[31] However, Caine later claimed: "I have never seen it [the film], but by all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific!"[32] In his 1992 autobiography What's it All About?, he says that the film "will go down in my memory as the time when I won an Oscar, paid for a house and had a great holiday. Not bad for a flop movie."[33]

Lance Guest played Ellen's eldest son Mike. Guest had dropped out of his sophomore year at UCLA (1981) to appear in another sequel to a horror classic; Halloween II.[34] Karen Young played his wife Carla. She commended the director's emphasis upon characterization.[24]

Mario Van Peebles played Jake, Michael's colleague. His father, Melvin Van Peebles, has a cameo in the film as Nassau's mayor.[35] Mitchell Anderson appeared as Ellen's youngest son, Sean. Lynn Whitfield played Louisa, and stunt performer Diane Hetfield was the victim of the banana boat attack.

In addition to the 124 cast and crew members, 250 local extras were also hired. The majority of the extras were used as members of the local high school band, chorus and dramatic society that can be seen as the Brodys walk through the town, and during Sean's attack. A local gravestone maker produced 51 slabs for the mock graveyard used for Sean's funeral.[36]

Principal photography for Jaws: The Revenge took place on location in New England and in the Bahamas, and completed on the Universal lot. Like the first two films of the series, Martha's Vineyard was the location of the fictional Amity Island for the film's opening scenes. Edgartown welcomed the production because it brought more business to the tourist town, which was usually very quiet in February.[37] Production commenced on February 2, 1987, by which time "snowstorms had blanketed" the island for almost a month, "providing a frosty backdrop for the opening scenes."[36] Cinematographer John McPherson recalls that filming in the Vineyard was very cold, and required seven generators and lots of equipment. He says the six-day shoot covered 22 pages of the script.[38]

The cast and crew moved to Nassau in the Bahamas on February 9, beginning principal photography there the next day. Like the production of the first two films, they encountered many problems with varying weather conditions. The location did not offer the "perfect world" that the 38-day shoot required. Cover shots were filmed on shore and in interior sets.[36] Cinematographer McPherson reports that some scenes had to be filmed across several days, presenting challenges for matching the weather.[39]

The underwater sequences were coordinated from a 85ft boat called Moby II. Second Unit Director Jordan Klein says that it was initially challenging for the actors to get used to the "foreign environment" of performing underwater. Stunt performer Gavin McKinney stood in for Lance Guest in the scene with the moray eel because it was potentially dangerous.[40]

Principal photography completed in Nassau on 26th May, although the special effects team continued working until 4th June.[41] Production then moved to the two sets which had been constructed at Universal Studios for the Neptune's Folly sequences, and also some reshoots of Sean's death. A tank had been painted to replicate Nassau's sea bed, and a huge backdrop was painted to look like the Bahamas sky. However, as John McPherson points out, the backdrop looked rather artificial, which the production had no remaining time to resolve.[42]

The film was shot in the Super 35 format, with Arriflex cameras equipped with Zeiss Superspeed lenses for underwater sequences.[43] Cinematographer John McPherson also supervised the underwater unit, which was headed by Pete Romano. Whereas underwater photography was normally filmed with an anamorphic lens, requiring overhead lighting, Romano filmed these "sequences with Zeiss, a 35 mm super-speed lens, which allows the natural ambiance to come through on film."[36]

A frame from the sequence where the shark is destroyed, showing a shark model. Henry Millar was awarded for "Worst Visual Effects" at the 1987 Golden Raspberry Awards.

The special effects team, headed by Henry Millar, had arrived at South Beach, Nassau on January 12, 1987, almost a month before principal photography commenced there. In the official press release, Millar says that when he became involved "we didn't even have a script ... but as the story developed and they started telling us all what they wanted ... I knew this wasn't going to be like any other shark anyone had ever seen."[36]

The shark was to be launched from atop an 88-foot (27 m) long platform, made from the trussed turret of a 30-foot (9.1 m) crane, and floated out into Clifton Bay. Seven sharks, or segments, were produced. They were constructed of fibreglass, a metal frame and latex skin. The models were operated from a platform capable of rotating 180 degrees underwater, with a hydraulic arm operating the sharks.[44]

Two models were fully articulated, two were made for jumping, one for ramming, one was a half shark (the top half) and one was just a fin. The two fully articulated models each had 22 sectioned ribs and movable jaws covered by a flexible water-based latex skin, measured 25 feet (7.6 m) in length and weighed 2500 pounds. Each tooth was half-a-foot long and as sharp as it looked. All models were housed under cover ... in a secret location on the island.[36]

Universal had originally considered tasking Industrial Light & Magic to create a miniature free-swimming shark akin to the whale in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.[45] The whale's designer suggested that the model could be easily converted into a shark, but its scale would be too problematic, and the proposal was aborted.[29]

Instead, Ted Rae, who had worked on Jaws 3-D, was commissioned to create a stop-motion shark for Jaws: The Revenge. When designing and sculpturing the models, Rae tried to strike a balance between matching the full-scale sharks built by Millar, and the live action footage. Rae criticised the full-scale models, saying they "looked like a concrete log with teeth... and doesn't look as good as the shark in the first film."[45] The animatronic puppets would subsequently appear in 3 or 4 shots in the completed film. Rae also constructed shark and miniature boat for the climatic sequences; however, Sargent didn't like Rae's footage, and took the models to Universal for completion there.[45]

The film company returned to Universal to finish shooting on April 2.[46]Additional underwater photography was completed in a water tank, measuring 50 feet (15 m) by 100 feet (30 m) across, and 17 feet (5.2 m) in depth, in Universal Studio's Stage 27. Also, a replica of Nassau's Clifton Bay and its skyline was created on the man-made Falls Lake on the studio backlot.[36] Principal photography was completed in Los Angeles on May 26. Millar's special effects team, however, remained in Nassau, completing second unit photography on June 4.[46]

Adverse weather conditions and problems with the mechanical sharks meant that the product was delayed and exceeded its $23m budget.[47] Despite this, the production was hurried in order to meet the July 1987 release date.[48] According to associate producer and production manager Frank Baur during the sequel's filming, "This [Revenge] will be the fastest I have ever seen a major film planned and executed in all of my 35 years as a production manager."[16]

A television documentary, "Behind the Scenes with Jaws: The Revenge", was broadcast in the U.S. on July 10, 1987. Twenty-two minutes in length, it was written and directed by William Rus for Zaloom Mayfield Productions.[49]

In the original theatrical version's ending, Ellen rammed the shark with Mike's boat, mortally wounding it. The shark then causes the boat to break apart with its death contortions, forcing the people on the boat to jump off to avoid going down with it.[50] American audiences disapproved of this ending. Following this, a different ending was ordered to be shot for foreign distribution in which the shark gets stabbed with the bow sprit and then inexplicably explodes, with Jake being found wounded but alive. Universal used this ending on home media releases.

A rumor persisted that the re-shooting of the ending prevented Michael Caine from collecting his Academy Award for Hannah and Her Sisters in person.[51] The re-shot ending reportedly began filming only five days after the film was released in the United States. The new ending was the version released in other Western countries.[52] The original ending can be seen on cable broadcasts.[51] In his review of the film, Roger Ebert said that he could not believe "[t]hat the director, Joseph Sargent, would film this final climactic scene so incompetently that there is not even an establishing shot, so we have to figure out what happened on the basis of empirical evidence."[53]

Jaws: The Revenge was originally screened on AMC in the United States and on BBC in the United Kingdom. The AMC version includes a number of deleted and extended scenes that were removed from the original theatrical release. These include spoken narration prior to the opening credits explaining that some circumstances can be due to fate, and more dialogue between Ellen and Hoagie as well as between Michael and Jake. There are additional shots of the shark diving towards the submersible and slightly different angles showing Jake's death.[61]

The film's first broadcast on BBC became notorious for showing the film in an open matte (4:3) format, rather than the 2.35:1 ratio in which the film was intended to be exhibited. This meant that some wires needed to operate the mechanical shark were visible, rather than being obscured by black bars or a pan and scan system.[62]

Jaws: The Revenge was the first film of the series to be released on DVD. It was released on Region 1 as a 'vanilla' disc by Goodtimes, featuring Spanish and French subtitles. The feature is presented in a non-anamorphic 2.35:1 widescreen transfer. The soundtrack was presented in Dolby Digital 4.1, with one reviewer saying that the "stereo separation is great with ocean waves swirling around you, the bubbles going by during the scuba scenes, and Hoagie's airplane flying around behind you." The same reviewer praised the image transfer of McPherson's "extremely well photographed" cinematography.[63] The film was re-released on DVD by Universal on June 3, 2003, in an anamorphic transfer. In 2015, Jaws: The Revenge was re-released on DVD as part of a three movie multi-pack, along with Jaws 2 and Jaws 3-D.

Universal Pictures released Jaws: The Revenge on Blu-ray on June 14, 2016. The bonus features on the disc are the film's theatrical trailer and the restored original theatrical ending in high definition.[64]

Jaws: The Revenge was universally panned by critics and audiences alike.[65] On Rotten Tomatoes, with 41 reviews, the film has an approval rating of 0%, with an average rating of 2.7/10. The critical consensus reads, "Illogical, tension-free and filled with cut-rate special effects, Jaws: The Revenge is a sorry chapter in a once-proud franchise."[66] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 15 out of 100, based on 15 critics, indicating "overwhelming dislike".[67] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "C−" on an A+ to F scale.[68]

For her performance, Gary was nominated for both a Saturn Award for Best Actress and a Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Actress; she lost to Jessica Tandy for *batteries not included and Madonna for Who's That Girl, respectively. It was rated by Entertainment Weekly as one of "The 25 Worst Sequels Ever Made".[8] It was voted number 22 by readers of Empire magazine in their list of The 50 Worst Movies Ever.[69]

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film zero stars, writing in his review that it "is not simply a bad movie, but also a stupid and incompetent one." He lists several elements that he finds unbelievable, including that Ellen is "haunted by flashbacks to events where she was not present". Ebert joked that Caine could not attend the ceremony to accept his Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor earned for Hannah and Her Sisters because of his shooting commitments on this film, because he may not have wanted to return to the shoot if he had left it.[53] On their review show, both Ebert and his colleague Gene Siskel slated the film, also pointing out a number of "logical errors amongst many logical errors" including a scene near the end where Michael Caine's shirt is dry despite the character having just hauled himself out of the water. Siskel concluded his review by saying "let's hope this is the end of the Jaws saga".

Critics also addressed the implausibility of some aspects of the plot. Given the Brodys' history, Caryn James of The New York Times asked "Why hasn't this family moved to Nebraska?"[70] The sequence in which the shark "literally leaps out of the water and can roar like a lion"[65] became so notorious that it inspired the title of the 2022 making-of book The Shark is Still Roaring.[71] Other implausible elements include the shark swimming from a Massachusetts island to the Bahamas (approx. 1,920 km (1,193 mi; 1,037 nmi)) in less than three days, somehow knowing that the Brody family went to the Bahamas, or following Michael through an underwater labyrinth, as well as the implication of such a creature seeking revenge.[65] The Independent pointed out that "the film was riddled with inconsistencies [and] errors (sharks cannot float or roar like lions)".[60] Consequently Entertainment Weekly pointed out that the promotional material's claim that it is "the most incredible" Jaws film is "technically correct".[8]

In contrast, however, I.Q. Hunter writes, "the cheap shark effects aren’t especially disastrous considering what was possible before CGI."[72] Derek Winnert ends his otherwise lukewarm review by stating, "the Bahamas backdrops are pretty and the shark looks as toothsome as ever".[73] Critics commented upon the sepia-toned flashbacks to the first film. A scene with Michael and Thea imitating each other is interspersed with shots from a similar scene in Jaws of Sean (Jay Mello) and Martin Brody. Similarly, the shark's destruction contains footage of Martin Brody aiming at the compressed air tank, saying "Smile, you son of a ... ". Caryn James comments that "nothing kills a sequel faster than reverence ... Joseph Sargent, the director, has turned this into a color-by-numbers version of Steven Spielberg's original Jaws."[70]

In a 2019 scholarly article, I.Q. Hunter argues that the film "is valuable as a case study because it is not a ‘standard’ SoBIG ["so bad it's good"] failure. It is neither a weird anomaly with a passionate and visible fan-base, nor the product of an archaic cash-strapped production context. Nor was it a massive flop, redolent of budgetary overkill and artistic vanity. Jaws: The Revenge is simply, by universal consensus, a very bad film."[74]

The increasing number of sequels in the Jaws series was spoofed in the 1989 film Back to the Future Part II (which was produced by Steven Spielberg and featured Jaws 3 star Lea Thompson), when Marty McFly travels to the year 2015 and sees a theater showing Jaws 19 (fictionally directed by Max Spielberg), with the tagline "This time it's REALLY REALLY personal!". This alludes to the tagline of Jaws: The Revenge: "This time it's personal."[79] After being "attacked" by a promotional volumetric image of the shark outside the theatre, Marty says "the shark still looks fake." In celebration of "Back to the Future Day" in 2015, Universal released a parody trailer for Jaws 19, where the sequels after The Revenge would have included sharks in various environments, prequels, and even a love story titled Jaws 17: Fifty Scales of Grey.[80]

The film is listed in Golden Raspberry Award founder John Wilson's book The Official Razzie Movie Guide as one of The 100 Most Enjoyably Bad Movies Ever Made.[81]