Spielberg’s Genius Strikes with ‘Jaws on Land’ – A Cult Classic Rated 4.3/5!

“I have no problem admitting this“: according to Steven Spielberg, Jurassic Park is the secret sequel to one of the greatest monster movies of all time, Jaws!

There are probably few people who haven’t heard of Jurassic Park or Jaws: both productions by Steven Spielberg have truly left their mark on popular culture. However, not everyone knows that their creator envisioned, in his own way, Jurassic Park as a sequel to Jaws, as he explained in an interview given to The New Yorker in 1994.

Touching on similar themes, and according to the filmmaker’s statement, it seems that Jurassic Park is a sequel that moved the story from the sea to dry land.

I’m not ashamed to say that with Jurassic, I was simply trying to make a worthy sequel to Jaws. On land. It’s blatant – I can tell you that now.

And if you think about it, it makes sense, as both productions deal with similar issues: they feature a monster (the shark / the T-Rex) endangering a community (the town of Amity / the amusement park) and it’s up to a trio of brave individuals to solve the problem (Brody-Quint-Hooper / Grant-Sattler-Malcolm).

A Sequel 18 Years Later

For Steven Spielberg, Jaws was a groundbreaking film that opened many doors—the film is even considered the first blockbuster in cinema history. Naturally, after such success, the studio wanted a sequel as soon as possible, but according to Spielberg himself, he was “done with the ocean“—and left the sequels to other filmmakers.

Eighteen years later, he invested all the energy that would have been necessary for a sequel to Jaws into Jurassic Park, moving from the ocean to land and creating another major blockbuster for cinema, marking the start of another great series of films.

However, Jurassic Park is only a symbolic sequel to Jaws: no, we did not see a wild crossover in which humans must face not only dinosaurs but also sharks. Instead, Spielberg’s vision of a sequel is simply that the two films deal with similar subjects, so for him, as an author, they are somehow connected.

Spielberg’s confession also explains why Jaws appears in Jurassic Park—literally. Find out how here!

Jurassic Park (1993) is available for streaming on Prime Video. Jaws is available on MyCanal.