The JAWS Sequel That Almost Became a Ridiculous Comedy Called JAWS 3, PEOPLE 0 — GeekTyrant

Geek Tyrant

25-06-2025

The Jaws franchise took a nosedive after Steven Spielberg's original masterpiece. Jaws 2 played it safe. Jaws 3-D tried a gimmick, and Jaws: The Revenge ... well, that one had a shark hunting a specific family out of spite. But in an alternate timeline, the third Jaws movie could've gone completely off the rails!
It almost became a full-blown comedy.
Right after Jaws 2 , producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown were looking for a fresh angle. Audiences were already saturated with knockoffs with films like Grizzly , Orca , Tentacles , and so on. Horror was inching into satire territory, and Zanuck and Brown had just seen Universal score big with National Lampoon's Animal House . So they thought, why not lean into that energy?
Enter Matty Simmons of National Lampoon. In the 2023 documentary Sharksploitation , Simmons recalled the surreal moment this all started:
'I was over at Universal. My next-door neighbors were Dick Zanuck and David Brown. First thing [Brown] said to me was, 'Dick and I would love to make a movie with you guys.' So, out of the blue — I just started kidding around — I just said, 'Jaws 3, People Nothing.'
'I said, 'Peter Benchley walks out of his house in a bathing suit, jumps into his pool, and disappears. And the next thing we see a fin floating around in the pool.' ... He said, 'I love it, I love it, I'll call you tomorrow. We're going to make this movie.''
That joke pitch turned into actual momentum. Writers Tod Carroll and a then-unknown John Hughes were brought on to write the script. Joe Dante, hot off his Piranha spoof, was offered the director's chair, thanks in part to Steven Spielberg himself stepping in to stop Universal from suing over Piranha.
As Dante explained:
'Universal was very concerned and annoyed that Roger was putting out his rip-off of Jaws the same year that Jaws 2 was coming out, and so, they apparently threatened an injunction.
'I discovered much later that Spielberg had stepped in ... and said, 'No, you don't get it, this is a spoof, this isn't really a rip-off,' although it is a rip-off. And we basically got away with it, I guess is the phrase. And because of that, I was offered Jaws 3, People 0.'
Sets were under construction, mechanical sharks were being built. Bo Derek was even circling the cast. It was happening… until it wasn't.
The project fell apart. No one's totally sure why. Some point to Spielberg, others to the producers losing their nerve. But Dante believes it came down to creative differences between the Lampoon crew and the Jaws producers:
'The National Lampoon people wanted to make an R-rated comedy, like Animal House. And the more conservative Zanuck and Brown team wanted to make a PG and have it be a wide-release family picture ...
' I think the project died because they just couldn't agree on what movie they were making. And you can't go into a movie with two entities as powerful as National Lampoon was at that time and Zanuck and Brown and have them fighting constantly through the entire movie. It's just a bad idea, and I think they just pulled the plug.'
Simmons put it even more bluntly:
'They had to choose between me and Spielberg, and I suspect they made the right choice.'
Looking back, Jaws 3, People 0 feels like one of those legendary 'what-if' projects, something that might have bombed spectacularly or become a cult classic. The horror genre eventually embraced self-parody, but in 1983, this kind of meta-comedy was still uncharted waters.
Would it have worked? Who knows. But a Jaws spoof written by John Hughes, directed by Joe Dante, and produced by the Animal House team is something we'd absolutely pay to see.
If Universal ever wants to revive Jaws with a fresh angle, maybe it's time to bring back the one idea that was just too wild for 1983: a sequel that bites back with a smile.