Experience JAWS: The Exhibition At The Academy Museum This Month
We popped into the Academy Museum for an early press preview of their new installation, Jaws: The Exhibition, celebrating the 50th anniversary of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, and will remain on view through July 26, 2026. The exhibit is the museum’s first large-scale exhibition for a single movie. And large-scale it is. Visitors will find over 200 objects within the galleries, many never before publicly displayed, including materials from the personal collections of Steven Spielberg and the Amblin Hearth Archive, the NBCUniversal Archives & Collections, and the vast Academy Collection.
Visitors will find screen-used props, behind the scenes photos and paraphernalia, and even interactive elements. Museum goers will have the opportunity to put their acting skills to the test when they take a seat in a beach chair to recreate Chief Brody’s iconic dolly zoom shot.
The Academy Museum has also announced that in 2028, it will honor the legacy of Steven Spielberg and mount the first-ever retrospective exhibition dedicated to Spielberg’s era-defining career, providing visitors with insight into his creative process and bringing them closer than ever to his filmography.
Jaws: The Exhibition unfolds in a way intended to expand on the three-act structure of the film, the story is told in six sections: “The Unseen Danger,” “Amity Island Welcomes You,” “Sunday at the Beach,” “The Shark’s Rampage,” “Adventure Ahead,” and “Into the Deep.” A seventh, concluding gallery explores the enduring impact of the film.
Along the way, visitors will also “meet” the people behind the scenes through props and artifacts, as well as museum placards that tell the stories behind the scenes.
Additional interactive elements include the chance to play John Williams’ now infamous two-note Jaws theme, and a chance to control Bruce the shark thanks to a scale replica.
The preview was opened up by the Hollywood Scoring Orchestra playing Williams’ legendary score, and the morning’s orchestra actually included two musicians who played on the original film score recording.
If all of this was not jaw dropping enough… Steven Spielberg took the stage to welcome guests and share some personal and unprepared remarks about the exhibit. After asking the orchestra members who played on the original score “with Johnny Williams” to stand and be recognized, Spielberg explained to the audience, “Because I didn’t come prepared in 1974 to make Jaws, I decided to risk it again and not come prepared with any remarks today to talk to you about. So I’m empty-handed, except with a collection of memories stimulated just in the last hour and a half by walking through the exhibition that they have so ingeniously assembled from the archives of collectors all over the world who somehow knew something that I didn’t know. I mean, why would anybody , when we shot the opening scene of Chrissie Watkins being taken by the shark, we had a buoy floating in the water. How did anybody know to take the buoy and take it home, sit on it for fifty years, and then loan it to the Academy?”
Spielberg quipped he believed his career “was virtually over halfway through production on Jaws… I thought I'd better give this my all because I’m not working in the industry again after they see the movie. Fortunately, fortune smiled on us. I didn’t intend to make a shark movie, I intended to tell the story about these three polar opposites: Quint, Brody, Hooper, and also Mayor Vaughn.”
We can all thank Spielberg's hubris for this monster blockbuster and a lifetime of cinematic gold, “My hubris was that we could take a Hollywood crew, go twelve miles out into the Atlantic Ocean and shoot an entire movie with a mechanical shark. I thought that was going to go swimmingly.”
The director recalled how the studio was practically begging him to call it off after going well over schedule, and in the midst of recalling the messy production, Spielberg continues to speak so fondly of his team from 51 years ago. “It is what you read about. This was a real exercise in hubris and futility, but because none of us wanted to quit, that’s how we finished the movie. Nobody wanted to quit. Nobody wanted to stop.”
And because nobody wanted to stop, we got a masterpiece that we are celebrating fifty years later. “We finally got through this thing, and what got all of us through it was being in the company of each other. That was the key that got us through it. The camaraderie that happens when you’re just trying to survive something brought all of us closer together. I’ve never been closer to a crew or a cast until many years later. This was the ultimate example that when you work as a team, you can actually get the ball across the finish line.
“And we did. I’m very proud of the movie. The film certainly cost me a pound of flesh but gave me a ton of career. The success of the movie gave me the chance to make any movie I wanted to make after that. The second Jaws came out, everyone wanted to make my UFO movie.”
Paying kudos to the Academy Museum, Spielberg shared, “Every room has the minutiae of how this picture got together and proves that this motion picture industry is really, truly a collaborative art form. This is an art form that only survives based on getting the best people in all the right positions. It’s a collaborative medium, and I’m so proud to be part of it and so proud to be part of this museum.”
When the live orchestra began to play a montage of John Williams’ iconic Jaws compositions, with two members of the film’s original recording orchestra on that stage and the movie stills projected behind them, the goosebumps that charged up and down my arms felt like an undoubtedly universal phenomenon.
I feel like this is a safe space, and I know you’ll get it when I tell you that after that full score sampler, when Steven Spielberg took the stage, feet away from us, talking about this movie that means so much to so many and how the studio basically begged him to quit, but the Jaws crew just didn’t stop…. This living legend, responsible for so many of our favorite movies, the man who has provided an infinite well of inspiration for aspiring filmmakers and movie lovers of all ages… I was fighting back tears with all my might because some moments are almost just too damn surreal.
If you weren’t in that room Wednesday morning, I promise I was holding you in my heart, not taking a moment of it for granted, and doing my best to experience it for us all collectively before coming back here to take you along for the ride.
It goes without saying that if you’re a Jaws fan, this exhibit is a must. But if you are a film fan in any capacity, this exhibit is a must, and you’ll find floor after floor of wonderful things to marvel at during your Academy Museum visit. Big congratulations to Steven Spielberg, Amy Homma (Director and President, Academy Museum), Jenny He (Senior Exhibitions Curator, Academy Museum), and everyone who worked to bring this incredible (and massive!) exhibition to life.
You can see Jaws: The Exhibition at the Academy Museum, opening September 14, 2025, through July 26, 2026.
The exhibition includes:
– Behind-the-scenes photos of Spielberg on set, the construction of the mechanical shark used in production, location scouting, and the cast and crew during filming, as well as Super 8 foot-age shot by Steven Spielberg during the making of Jaws
– Handwritten and hand-sketched materials, including Steven Spielberg’s annotated script, storyboards and original concept illustrations of the shark by production designer Joe Alves, composer John Williams’s sheet music, and sketches of a shark rising from the depths by the artist behind the iconic Jaws poster image, Roger Kastel
– Filming and editing equipment, including the Moviola machine used by the film’s editor Verna Fields, the original Jaws clapper board from the collection of Steven Spielberg, and the Panavision Underwater Camera used to shoot key scenes
– Original props, including the prop head of Ben Gardner used for the film's indelible “jump scare,” Quint’s fighting chair and the shark weathervane from his shack, Hooper’s shark cage, components of the Orca, and the “Beach Closed” sign
– Recreations of the “Amity Island Welcomes You” billboards, orange and white striped beach cabanas, and the shark chalkboard drawing featured during Quint’s introduction (remade for the Academy Museum by production designer Joe Alves)
– Promotional items, from original theatrical release posters from around the world to innovative merchandise such as the Jaws “Feeding Time” cereal box, iron-on patches, toys, accessories and even products from Universal theme parks around the globe
– Interactives, including opportunities to recreate the film’s dolly zoom effect, play John Williams’s two-note score that signals the shark’s approach, and operate a scale replica of the mechanical shark
The Academy Museum will celebrate the exhibition’s opening with a screening of Jaws in 4K on September 14. At the same time, the Academy Museum Store will launch an exclusive line of Jaws-inspired merchandise, including a commemorative 50th anniversary vinyl pressing of John Williams’s Oscar®-winning film score in collaboration with Mondo, an exclusive 1975 variant screen printed poster, a Jaws Amity Island ringer tee, Jaws hoodie, “The Game of Jaws” 50th anniversary edition, and Jaws Amity Island billboard scaled prop replica.
