Jaws: the revenge and the production of failure

Abstract

ABSTRACTMost studies of ‘so bad it’s good’ (SoBIG) and bad movies have understandably focused on issues of reception and especially fan consumption. This article, on the notorious 1987 disaster, Jaws: The Revenge, considers instead the production context of ‘badness’ and asks how a team of seasoned and talented Hollywood professionals managed to create a film with a 0% Rotten Tomatoes score. Unlike many ‘badfilms’, Jaws: The Revenge is a mainstream mid-budget film and neither a weird anomaly with a passionate and visible fan-base nor the product of an archaic cash-strapped production context. The article unpicks the film’s logic of production and argues that its badness was an emergent property of misguided creativity, deviations from audience expectations, a tight production schedule, and substandard but marginally competent execution. The filmmaking team were not idiots savants or (primarily) cynical exploitation merchants, but problem-solving professionals on a budget. Having tracked how the film’s SoBIG status was achieved within rather than outside Hollywood norms and conventions, the article concludes that the pedagogic value of Jaws: The Revenge is that its production of absolute failure offers a good case-study, paradoxically, of wider processes of industrial logic.