Tracy Jordan, Tracy Morgan’s character on 30 Rock, as soon as suggested a buddy to stay each week like it’s Shark Week. In 2026, Hollywood has lastly taken these sage phrases to coronary heart.
Though Discovery Channel is solely observing its annual Shark Week of shark-themed programming for the customary seven days, shark motion pictures have been having fun with a yearlong renaissance – when it comes to quantity, if not essentially high quality. Two shark thrillers – The Devil’s Mouth on Prime Video and Above & Below as a paid VOD rental – are releasing this week, presumably to enrich nonfictional Shark Week programming, however they’re removed from the solely fish in the sea. Earlier this month, Clint Eastwood’s daughter starred in The Bay, one other VOD title. In June, there was Chum, starring Alice Eve; in May, Deep Water, Renny Harlin’s return to the subgenre following his basic Deep Blue Sea. Before that, Thrash was a Netflix hit. That’s half a dozen shark motion pictures to this point this yr. It’s a marvel nobody has organized a Tenth-anniversary re-release of The Shallows.
Obviously there’s a baseline, sellable degree of curiosity in shark thrillers, which are sometimes positioned as one thing akin to an all-natural slasher: horror motion pictures that increase simply barely past the bounds of the world we all know (the seaside, the ocean, observing nature) and into heightened however not fully outlandish territory. They’re the water equal of the masked killer stalking round the woods, solely we’ve all seen footage of sharks – due to Discovery and the like – so we are able to all agree that they’re undoubtedly on the market, and may be lethal to people – even when the actuality is far much less grotesque, frequent or vengeful than their movie equivalents.
What makes the pursuit of recent shark motion pictures more quixotic than another horror/thriller subgenres is the existence of a single agreed-upon masterpiece that’s near-impossible to match. While it’s unlikely that any given new landlubber slasher will signify a pantheon-level genre-definer, a minimum of there are a selection of near-perfect classics to emulate: the proto-slasher creepiness of Psycho, the unnerving rural underbelly of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the suburban menace of Halloween, the phantasmagorical dreamscape of A Nightmare on Elm Street. With shark motion pictures, it’s Jaws, after which every part else. (Some of these slashers have good and/or fascinating sequels with additional innovations; not so Jaws, which simply has three more and more ludicrous and low-cost model extensions.) Working from perhaps the beachiest seaside learn of all time with a notoriously finicky faux shark, Steven Spielberg crafted a movie that’s concurrently a male-bonding character research, an indictment of keep-the-beaches-open American capitalism, and an expertly tuned thrill machine full with unforgettable theme music. By sheer drive of high quality, it reinvented the barely there shark movie, and the complete of summer time motion pictures together with it.
Eventually, just a few significantly robust iterations did determine how you can function inside the shadow of Jaws, although they needed to wait out these awful follow-ups, which reached a nadir in 1987 with the all-time stinker Jaws: The Revenge. Deep Blue Sea, Harlin’s amped-up summer time movie from 1999, looks like a Jaws sequel finished proper: it goes the greater/quicker/crazier route, with genetically modified sharks and noticeably dumber people. Its thematic is the usual monster-movie scientists-playing-god cautionary story, however as a creature characteristic it’s juicy, well-cast (Samuel L Jackson!), and loads of enjoyable. Another spotlight goes in the other way. The aforementioned The Shallows, from summer time 2016, strips down the three-men-on-a-boat climax of Jaws even additional; most of the movie is simply Blake Lively stranded on a rock, trying to outwit a very persistent shark as she grieves the lack of her mom. Director Jaume Collet-Serra has a number of motion pictures that play with Hitchcock-style location limitations; The Shallows is one in every of his most restricted and in addition one in every of his greatest.
The Shallows – together with the more bummed-out survival-thriller indies Open Water and 47 Meters Down – has managed to assist redefine the parameters of the shark thriller. Over the previous decade, they have a tendency to both comply with the Shallows/47 Meters route of a handful of characters, often girls, exorcising some type of trauma or interpersonal battle via a trial-by-teeth encounter with sharks; or try to be form of a considering man’s model of Sharknado, the tediously “knowing” D-movie franchise from cable’s SyFy, the place sharks are flown into unlikely locations or conditions. (Think of the current Netflix hit Under Paris, which contrived irresistible however finally schlocky methods for CG sharks to show up in the Seine circa the 2024 Olympics.) If nothing else, each kinds arrange more achievable objectives than evoking a very nice movie like Jaws.
So how do that yr’s crop stack up in that context? Of the two Shark Week releases, The Devil’s Mouth follows the Shallows path, whereas Above & Below has more of a Sharknado fashion, although it additionally borrows closely from 47 Meters Down. The Devil’s Mouth focuses on associates, led by two besties (Kathryn Newton and Lana Condor), vacationing in Thailand, the place they embark on a swimming tour of an off-ocean cave system. The movie, appears, if something, overly self-conscious about the motivations which are speculated to gasoline characters in survival thrillers, which suggests the two leads each have useless dad and mom, whereas additionally participating in a semi-toxic dynamic that the movie by no means fairly absolutely defines. As a consequence, it finally looks like it’s a movie about the perils of getting a greatest buddy who’s simply typically form of annoying.
But its location capturing with built-in ambiance, and the sparing use of shark results this permits, goes a good distance towards making it watchable Shallows knockoff. If director Jeff Wadlow doesn’t have the B-movie mastery of Collet-Serra, he a minimum of has some B-minus-movie power and watchable stars, particularly scream queen Newton. Above & Below ought to actually be the kickier B-movie affair, following one other group of 5 younger folks on trip, whose shark-observing cage-dive boat seems to be affiliated with a bunch of criminals. Like 47 Meters Down, a lot of it includes the logistics of conserving oxygen whereas trapped underwater, to which DTV veteran Jesse V Johnson provides some legal bickering and shootouts above sea degree; not fairly Sharknado bombast, however the same sense of cross-breeding. Antonio Banderas is entertaining as the courteous however cruel head legal, however the fusion of literal and metaphorical sharks is disappointingly rote. It’s two chintzy DTV motion pictures in a single, a 90-minute time-saver however little else.
The factor is, as many creative concepts as shark-movie-makers can brainstorm, the creatures themselves are pretty rigid; neither middling CG nor actual footage nor mechanical fashions are likely to really feel significantly convincing on their very own. These actual animals are additionally main visible results challenges which have largely been shunted downstream to smaller productions that may’t all the time deal with it. Even the odd big-budget try, like Jason Statham’s Meg motion pictures, are fairly crummy-looking. Just take a look at Harlin’s revisitation of his outdated feeding grounds with Deep Water. It’s not a sequel to Deep Blue Sea, however would-be companion piece that mixes a plane-crash survival narrative with a bunch of sharks. Guess which part is more suspenseful and plausible on display? Unlike their Deep Blue Sea counterparts, the sharks wind up feeling like afterthoughts.
Maybe that’s why a few of the greatest current shark-style motion pictures don’t characteristic sharks in any respect. 2019’s Crawl follows the Shallows template of a younger lady with household points thrust right into a harmful solo mission, right here rescuing her hurricane-stranded father relatively than saving herself, solely she’s bedeviled by alligators relatively than sharks. It’s so efficient that this yr’s Netflix shark flagship Thrash more or much less ripped it back off, subbing sharks swimming round submerged properties back in for the gators. Or contemplate the shock hit Fall, which options two younger girls with an intense historical past, stranded at nice top, no creatures required.
That movie is additionally only a plain outdated survival thriller, in fact, however it’s additionally illustrative of how little the sharks themselves typically carry to those eventualities, particularly when motion pictures can’t afford the results wanted to make them look realistically scary. Shark motion pictures could also be flashier offshoots of Shark Week that may run all yr (or a minimum of all summer time), however aside from their incapability to high Jaws, it’s laborious for them to compete with the eerie majesty of the actual factor. Spielberg included that elusiveness into his work, outlined as a lot by what we are able to’t see from land as what we’d glimpse inside the water. That’s not even essentially an argument for hiding the shark a lot as giving each the creature and the human motivations some area. Most modern shark photos are simply trying for different motion pictures to chew on.
