Published Apr 23, 2026, 3:02 PM EDT
Adam Bentz is a senior news writer at ScreenRant, where he has authored nearly 5,000 articles, including features and lists. He studied creative writing and English with a concentration in screenwriting at Southern New Hampshire University and interned as a writer/journalist for The Borgen Project, an influential organization that fights global poverty.
However, one of his proudest achievements is editing a Leonardo DiCaprio freakout compilation that has over 150K views on YouTube. Adam also fancies himself an amateur film reviewer on his website.
Steven Spielberg's seminal hit is sinking its teeth into Netflix.
A towering force of the New Hollywood renaissance and an architect of the modern blockbuster, Spielberg stands among cinema's most luminous and influential visionaries, and remains its highest-grossing director of all time. He first swept into the cultural wave with the tidal thrill of Jaws, then went on to enchant global audiences with a string of awe-filled spectacles, from Close Encounters of the Third Kind to E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and the iconic Indiana Jones adventures – one of which now beckons from the depths of Netflix.
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Over five decades after it changed cinema for good, Jaws is officially streaming. Directed by Steven Spielberg, based on the 1974 novel by Peter Benchley, the 1975 thriller follows a police chief who teams up with a young marine biologist and a seasoned shark hunter to track down a deadly great white terrorizing swimmers in a New England seaside town.
Now, over 50 years after its first hit theaters, Jaws is officially streaming on Netflix. It's one of many movies to hit the streaming service in April 2026, along with The Age of Adaline, Along Came Polly, American Gangster, Atonement, Bohemian Rhapsody, Casino, Kindergarten Cop, Lucy, five Mission: Impossible movies, Smokey and the Bandit, and many more.
Jaws stars Roy Scheider as police chief Martin Brody, Robert Shaw as professional shark hunter Quint, Richard Dreyfuss as marine biologist Matt Hooper, Lorraine Gary as Brody's wife, Ellen, and Murray Hamilton as the town's mayor, Larry Vaughn. The cast also includes Carl Gottlieb, Jeffrey Kramer, Susan Backlinie, Lee Fierro, and Peter Benchley.
Among its many accomplishments, Jaws received rave reviews, resulting in 97% and 91% scores on Rotten Tomatoes, with critics calling it compelling and expertly constructed storytelling paired with a carefully measured sense of fear. Over the decades, Jaws has endured as a standard for crafting modern blockbuster excitement.
Including all its re-releases, most recently in August 2025 for its 50th anniversary, Jaws has grossed a worldwide total of $495 million at the box office. At the time of its initial release in 1975, it held the record as the highest-grossing movie of all time until it was surpassed by Star Wars two years later.
The success of Jaws is seen as a landmark moment in movie history, as it became the model for the modern summer blockbuster. Alongside Star Wars, it played a key role in shaping Hollywood's contemporary commercial approach, which emphasizes high-earning action and adventure films built on straightforward high-concept ideas, released widely in the summer and promoted heavily.
Universal distributed Jaws across more than 450 theaters, a remarkably wide release for a major studio movie at the time, and supported it with an aggressive marketing push, including extensive television advertising and a range of merchandising tie-ins. Now, more than five decades later, Jaws resurfaces not in theaters, but in the endless ocean of streaming.
Release Date June 20, 1975
Runtime 124 minutes
Writers Peter Benchley, Carl Gottlieb
Producers David Brown
English (US) ·