But there is a big difference between reality and our perception of it. And cinema has since stepped into the breach. We can no longer count the films featuring voracious sharks. In 2018, it was In Troubled Waters which was a hit in theaters. Without forgetting the Sharknado saga on television. Today, Sous la Seine is preparing to do the same, this time on Netflix.
100 days before the Paris Olympic Games, a shark terrorizes the Seine
Meg, by Jon Turtelbaub, starred Jason Statham and rose to the top of the global box office despite competition from a heavyweight like Mission: Impossible Fallout. The film had grossed more than $310 million at the time. That’s still far from the billion (in current currency!) that Jaws grossed in the United States alone in the 1970s, but that doesn’t stop the film from being a colossal success.
Wide angle on sharks: an XXL massacre
As with all productions of the genre, the scenario was simple: a gigantic shark, in this case a megalodon, a prehistoric creature 23 meters long which was thought to be extinct, attacks man, here a team of researchers aboard a submarine. With a budget of $130 million, In Troubled Waters is a Hollywood blockbuster, the average cost of an American film being around $30 million. Jon Turtelbaub is riding the wave initiated in 1975 by Steven Spielberg with Jaws and regularly revitalized by a whole series of productions, each more crazy than the last, featuring one or more sharks.
With Sharknado
49 years ago, the American director had no idea that his terrifying mechanical creature would give birth to a genre that is still very popular, that of shark blockbusters. Despite a slump in the 90s – few films and few revenues – the fear of the great white and its congeners of the same species has regained momentum in recent years thanks to the Sharknado saga launched in 2013 on the American channel SyFy.
To shoot the first part, with its tornado of sharks hitting Los Angeles, director Anthony C. Ferrante, who signed all the other episodes, had only a single $1 million budget. A ridiculous envelope considering the investment put into Troubled Waters. But the effect was striking. It was enough for social networks to take hold of the thing to make it a phenomenon that has now become cult. Despite good audiences on SyFy (1.37 million viewers), it was via Twitter that everything came to a head. At the peak of its fame, the film generated more than 5,000 tweets per minute about it. And the sequel, released a year later, will confirm the craze. Nearly 4 million viewers, more than a billion tweets! And there were many celebrities in need of notoriety who agreed to appear in the following issues to rejuvenate themselves: from Bruno Salomone to Olivia Newton-John, including David Hasselhoff, Lou Ferrigno, George RR Martin (the author of Game of Thrones), YouTuber Natoo.
Assumed naughties
Make no mistake, Sharknado and the myriad of films of the genre which have invaded the Internet and television channels, do not intend to compete with Jaws, unlike others like Death at Large or Cruel Jaws. These productions are perfectly self-confessed fools who happily play the parody card with titles and scenarios that are all more improbable than the others. Ghost Shark where the story of the ghost of a shark returns for revenge, Teeth of the Snow in which a prehistoric shark attacks vacationers in the mountains, Sharktopus vs. Pteracuda where a half-shark, half-octopus creature confronts another, half-pterodactyl and half-anaconda. And what about Attack of the 5-headed shark (the sequel to Attack of the two-headed shark which preceded the three-headed one…) or Planet of the Sharks, remake of Planet of the Apes… If we except Instinct of survival or 47 meters down with more serious ambitions, it’s fishing for one-upmanship: always bigger, always more improbable, always crazier.
700 sharks in the night: a unique gathering of its kind
The delusions are such that we almost come to forget – if we ever knew it – that the film at the origin of all this, Jaws, is also partly responsible for the dirty reputation which sticks to the skin of sharks and therefore of the fear they arouse. The appearance of the slightest fin brings back to mind the terrifying images of Spielberg’s film for most people. And what about attacks, rare but always possible. Peter Benchley, the author of the novel behind Jaws, understood this well and regularly apologized for the negative image it created of the animal.
Did the director of the Sharknado saga feel the same feeling of guilt? Probably not. However, Anthony C. Ferrante has decided that the sixth part will be the last. It was released in 2018. For this last round, he will walk his bloody synthetic jaws through time, from prehistory to the cowboy era. You don’t change a recipe that works.
