The First Blockbuster Is Star Wars, Not Jaws
The Force is greater than the fin.
It’s a fun question to get right at bar trivia night: The first blockbuster was the 1975 Steven Spielberg horror flick Jaws, because that’s the first time people were lined up around the block to see a film over and over again. Not to mention, as the first movie to pass the $100 million mark, the kind of money it made at the box office was nuts at the time. Two years later, in 1977, the record was broken by Star Wars (not yet “A New Hope”), which made $127 million in its first year and worldwide grossed $307 million against a budget of just $11 million. In 2026 dollars, that’s roughly $1.698 billion. So, yes, Jaws set a new financial goalpost, but Star Wars easily left it in the dust.
Still, the $100 million box office record was broken by Jaws and not Star Wars; therefore, technically, Jaws gets the crown, and that little shark gets to wear the crown forever, right? Not so fast. We can keep repeating that Jaws is the first blockbuster over and over again, but this is a mere technicality. Because the legacy of Star Wars is what changed the nature of how people in the late 20th century and into the 21st century think about going to the movies at all. Yes, Jaws was innovative, but if we lived in a timeline in which Jaws was never made, the world wouldn’t change that much. But just try to imagine a world without Star Wars coming out in 1977 and becoming a hit. Really try. Now that you’ve imagined that dystopian cinematic hellscape, can one honestly say that Jaws is the first true blockbuster?
Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia in Star Wars.
The success of Star Wars is that it was more than a movie — it became an entire mood, allowing for the summer of 1977 to carry on into various subsequent years. Jaws is a very, very good horror movie, with wonderful direction, a perfect musical score, iconic performances, and some of the greatest movie lines of all time. It is also not a movie that really unifies people around any kind of central idea, other than maybe the idea that getting eaten by a shark is less than ideal. Further, the story of Jaws is basically a B-movie take on sea monster, the kind of thing that Roger Corman or Irwin Allen might have dreamed up a decade prior. Based on the novel by Peter Benchley and with a screenplay co-written by Carl Gottlieb, Jaws is the distillation of a thousand man-versus-nature stories from the beginning of time. It’s Captain Ahab. It’s The Old Man and the Sea. Maybe it’s even Jonah and the whale from the Bible.
Like the Campbellian monomyth, which influenced much of George Lucas’ writing, Jaws was remixing some classic hits. But it’s not like a 7-year-old can name all the characters in Jaws. The power of Star Wars isn’t that it broke some huge box office record; it’s that it created an entirely new genre of movies. Or, if we want to split hairs, Star Wars proved that the kind of all-ages space opera that once thrived in the 1930s and 1940s Flash Gordon film serials could appeal to an even bigger audience. Feeling the culture lacked movie heroes, Lucas revamped many of his childhood interests into a new kind of cinematic mythology, betting that many people in the world were waiting for something upbeat, familiar, and yet brand new. He couldn’t have been more right.
This, more than anything, is the shocking and truly innovative reason why Star Wars was a success. Not only was it a corny, upbeat, spiritually positive film, but it also had incredible style. Science fiction buffs of the time were quick to call the plot and tropes of Star Wars regressive and emblematic of an early stage of the genre that contemporary 1960s and 1970s print sci-fi had, in theory, left behind. Frank Herbert even mused that perhaps Star Wars ripped off Dune and briefly flirted with a lawsuit over the superficial similarities. Herbert had a few points, of course, but he missed the main one: Instead of being subversive about the hero’s journey, the transgressive thing about Star Wars is that it dared to be straightforward.
George Lucas, hard at work on Star Wars.
Today, fans like to say a show like Andor is the best Star Wars thing since Star Wars. This oft-repeated argument about grittiness and realism presents a compelling argument, but it fails to remember why the original 1977 film changed history. Star Wars was successful because it was nothing like Andor, because before 1977 most sci-fi stories were like Andor. Hell, George Lucas even made his own version of Andor — it’s called THX-1138, and it’s pretty good!
The point is that before 1977, science fiction movies that looked this good weren’t upbeat adventures for the whole family. Instead, great-looking (and great-sounding) sci-fi cinematic fare was dark and depressing; from Planet of the Apes to Logan’s Run to, yes, 2001. The punk rock thing that Lucas did with Star Wars was to prove that the masses can be entertained with a popcorn film that doesn’t shock them with murderous monsters or spurting blood.
Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker, the greatest film hero of all time?
The reason that Star Wars was the first blockbuster is that it was — and still is — a film for everyone. Jaws is not. Like The Wizard of Oz before it, the success of Star Wars changed the way we think about movies as a communal event. Today, we go to blockbusters to be wowed. But, if we’re honest, we also go to blockbusters to connect, to share in an event that others are experiencing, too.
That’s the true force of Star Wars; its unifying impact on all kinds of people, everywhere. And in that specific magic trick, it’s probably never been topped.
