Universal Pictures has been quietly weighing a return to the Jaws franchise, according to a source familiar with the matter, with the strong commercial performance of the studio’s recent 50th anniversary theatrical re-release helping to revive long-dormant conversations about a new feature in the franchise.
Any such project remains, at this point, in the earliest stages of consideration — there is no script, no greenlight, and no attached filmmaker. A representative for Universal Pictures had not commented publicly on the prospect of a new Jawsfilm as of publication.
The catalyst appears to have been the August 29 to September 4, 2025 Labor Day weekend re-release, which earned $8.1 million from 3,200 theaters over the traditional three-day window and an estimated $9.8 million through the holiday Monday, finishing in second place behind Warner Bros.’ Weapons. The number was, by re-release standards, a clear success — and it landed in the middle of a broader 50th anniversary campaign that produced a massive merchandising rollout across Universal theme parks, the Academy Museum’s Jaws: The Exhibition (running through July 26, 2026), a Nautica apparel collaboration, LEGO and Funko products, a Ravensburger family board game, and a Loungefly accessories line. Spielberg’s 1975 film, in short, demonstrated in 2025 that the brand still has commercial heat, fifty years on.
What a new ‘Jaws’ would have to grapple with
Specifics on creative direction have not been publicly disclosed, and no plot or treatment information has emerged. But any modern Jaws would, almost by definition, have to address two structural realities of the contemporary world that did not exist in 1975: advances in shark tracking and detection technology, and the role of the internet in shaping public response to a shark attack.
On the technology side, the past decade has produced a genuine revolution in how scientists and beach communities monitor great white shark populations. UC Santa Barbara’s Project SharkEye program, in partnership with researchers at the Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory, uses drones and AI-trained video analysis to identify and track sharks in real time off Southern California beaches. CSU Long Beach’s Shark Lab, run by Professor Chris Lowe, has spent years tagging white sharks with acoustic and satellite trackers; live data from those tags now feeds public-facing apps that alert swimmers when tagged sharks are nearby. A new Jaws film would almost inevitably have to engage with that world — turning the hunt for a rogue shark, once a story of three men in a boat with harpoons, into a story of drone footage, real-time data feeds, and a marine biology team trying to outrun the news cycle.
The internet angle is potentially the more interesting structural change. In Jaws (1975), the Amity Island shark attack is a local story — contained to a single beach community, contested in town meetings by Mayor Vaughn, suppressed by tourism interests. In a 2026-set version of the same story, an attack would not be local for five seconds. It would be on every social-media feed in the country within an hour, with cell phone footage, eyewitness threads, and a parallel discourse from a vocal contingent of shark advocates arguing that the victim shouldn’t have been in the shark’s habitat in the first place. The conservation framing of the past two decades — that humans kill roughly 100 million sharks per year, that great whites are an at-risk species, that the original Jaws itself is widely blamed for accelerating a half-century of shark population collapse — would be a constant presence in the narrative rather than a subtext.
Whether any of that crystallizes into a script is, again, not something Universal has publicly addressed. The conversations, to the extent they are happening at all, appear to remain at the level of “what would this even be.”
The Jaws: The Revenge problem
The reason Universal would be cautious here is straightforward: Jaws is one of the most lucrative ongoing merchandising properties the studio owns, and the franchise has been burned before.
Jaws: The Revenge, released in July 1987, holds a 0% Rotten Tomatoes score and is widely cited as one of the worst sequels in studio film history. Roger Ebert, in his contemporaneous review, called it “not simply a bad movie, but also a stupid and incompetent one — a ripoff.” The film was produced under duress — Universal had a disastrous 1986, with Howard the Duck and Legal Eagles both underperforming, and then-MCA president Sid Sheinberg greenlit The Revengein September 1986 with a locked release date roughly ten months out. Director Joseph Sargent was given about half the development time of a typical production. The script was incomplete when cameras rolled, and revisions were handed down nearly every day during the shoot. The result, by every available measure, was catastrophic for the franchise. Universal has not produced a new Jaws feature in the 38 years since.
The Revenge shadow is the obvious reason any internal conversation about a new Jaws would move slowly. The franchise’s branded products — the Universal Studios theme park attractions in Hollywood and Orlando, the 50th anniversary merchandise lines, the Funko, LEGO, Loungefly, and Nautica licensing deals, the continuing run of Jaws: The Exhibition — depend on the original film’s reputation remaining unblemished. A bad new Jaws film does not just lose money in its release window. It threatens the brand’s long-tail value across every adjacent business. The original is one of the most beloved American films ever made, and the franchise’s existing commercial value is enormous and ongoing. Any new entry has to clear an extraordinarily high bar, and the cost of getting it wrong is large.
Where things stand
Any new Jaws feature would, in the normal course of major-studio development, require a significant runway — finding the right filmmaker to thread the creative needle, developing a script, securing the involvement of key legacy figures, and then mounting a production of the scale a Jaws film would demand. None of that happens quickly, and in a franchise this commercially sensitive, the studio’s incentive is to move carefully rather than fast.
Steven Spielberg’s involvement — whether as a producer, an executive producer, or a creative consultant — would be widely expected to factor into any serious Jaws greenlight conversation, given his role in establishing the original and his continuing relationship with the property through Universal and Amblin. Spielberg has not publicly addressed the prospect of a new Jaws film. Amblin Entertainment had not commented publicly on the project as of publication.
For now, the conversation appears to be happening. Whether it stays a conversation or becomes a film is the question Universal is, by all indications, trying to answer slowly and carefully.
