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Tracy Jordan, Tracy Morgan’s character on 30 Rock, once advised a friend to spend every week as Shark Week. In 2026, Hollywood adopted this wise saying.
Although the Discovery Channel is only seeing its annual Shark Week program for the traditional seven days, shark movies have been enjoying a year-round renaissance – in terms of volume, if not in terms of quality. Two shark thrillers – Devil’s Mouth on Prime Video and Up & Down as a paid VOD rental – are releasing this week, presumably to complement Shark Week programming, but they’re far from the only fish in the sea. Earlier this month, Clint Eastwood’s daughter starred in The Bay, another VOD title. In June, there was Chum, who had Alice Eve; in May, Deep WaterRenny Harlin returns to the subgenre following his classic Deep Blue Sea. Before this, Thrash was a Netflix hit. That’s half of the shark movies so far this year. It’s amazing that no one planned a 10 year reissue The Shallows.
Obviously, there is a basic interest, which is sold on the fun of the shark game, which is usually something that includes nature: horror movies that grow a little beyond the limits of the world we know (beach, ocean, watching the environment) and reach the climax but not the strange part. It’s the water equivalent of a masked killer walking around the jungle, only because we’ve all seen sharks – thanks to Discovery and the like – so we can accept that they’re really out there, and they can be deadly to people – even if the reality is much more disturbing, frequent or vengeful than what they watch on film.
What makes the search for new shark movies more difficult than other horror/thriller genres is the existence of one unified technology that is close to match. Although it is unlikely that the new house burner will represent the genre of the pantheon, there are several genres that can be imitated: the proto-slasher creepiness of Psycho, the unsettled countryside of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the suburban horror of Halloween dreams on Elmgoma Night. It’s shark movies, that is Jawsand then everything else. (Some of the slashers have good and/or interesting sequels to other productions; not so much Jaws, which only has three extras that are over-the-top and cheap.) Working from a beach that is always read by the famous fake shark, Steven Spielberg has created a film that is at once about masculinity, a study of masculinity, and a study of American culture. a fun machine full of unforgettable theme songs. With a bang, it brought back the shark movie, and all the summer movies along with it.
Eventually, the super-powered recappers figured out how to work inside Jaws, though they had to wait for the sequel, which reached its nadir in 1987 with the all-time stinker Jaws: The Revenge. Deep Blue Sea, Harlin’s 1999 summer movie, feels like a jaw-dropping sequel done right: it goes the big, fast/crazy route, with genetically modified sharks and crazy people. His story is an old cautionary tale of scientists playing god, but as a creature it’s juicy, colorful (Samuel L Jackson!), and very entertaining. Another light goes in the opposite direction. The aforementioned The Shallows, from summer 2016, cuts to the jaw-dropping climax of three men on a boat; most of the film is Blake Lively anchored on a rock, trying to defeat a persistent shark especially while grieving the death of her mother. Director Jaume Collet-Serra has several films that play with the limits of Hitchcock’s genre; The Shallows is one of the rarest and one of the best.
The Shallows – along with the funniest indies surviving Open Water and 47 Meters Down – has been able to help redefine the shark thriller segment. Over the past decade, he has tended to follow the Shallows/47 Meters method of a few characters, usually women, who bring out some kind of pain or conflict in society through trials with teeth and sharks; or trying to be a Sharknado version of the thoughtful, boring “in-the-know” D-movie franchise from the SyFy cable franchise, where sharks are flown to unexpected places or events. (Think of Netflix’s recent hit Under Paris, which created an unmistakable but visually stunning set of CG sharks to appear in the Seine in the run-up to the 2024 Olympics.) If nothing else, all of these styles set possible goals beyond evoking a great movie like Jaws.
How is this year’s crop growing? Of the two Shark Week releases, Devil’s Mouth follows the Shallows approach, while Above & Below is a Sharknado style, though it also borrows heavily from 47 Meters Down. Devil’s Mouth focuses on friends, led by two besties (Kathryn Newton and Lana Condor), traveling to Thailand, where they embark on a sea cave diving adventure. The film, it seems, is, if possible, overconfident about what it means to be able to survive, which means that the two have dead parents, and are doing toxic things that the film doesn’t explain. As a result, it feels like a film about the dangers of having a best friend that is often annoying.
But its atmospheric shooting scene, and the neat use of sharks that make it possible, go a long way to making it look like a Shallows knockoff. If director Jeff Wadlow doesn’t have the B-movie talent of Collet-Serra, he has B-minus movie power and screen stars, especially scream queen Newton. Up & Down is supposed to be a kickier B-movie story, following a group of five teenagers on vacation, whose shark-watching boat turns out to be in cahoots with a gang. Like 47 Meters Down, much of it concerns how to maintain oxygen levels while trapped underwater, while DTV veteran Jesse V Johnson adds crime sprees and gunfights above sea level; not Sharknado bombast, but a similar concept of breeding. Antonio Banderas is fun as the polite but ruthless criminal, but the juxtaposition of real and simulated sharks is disappointing. It’s two DTV movies in one, saving 90 minutes but little else.
The truth is, as much as the imaginations of shark filmmakers can imagine, the real creatures don’t change; even mediocre CG or realistic graphics or mechanics tend to feel satisfying on their own. These real animals are big problems that look like they’ve been slowly progressing to small things that they can’t always deal with. Even big-budget attempts, like Jason Statham’s Meg movies, are pretty cool. Just look at Harlin’s iteration of his old haunt and Deep Water. It’s not a Deep Blue Sea model, but it could be a tie-in that combines the story of surviving a plane crash with a group of sharks. What do you think is the most suspicious and reliable part of the screen? Unlike their counterparts in the Deep Blue Sea, sharks can only feel exhausted.
Maybe that’s why the best recent shark movies don’t feature sharks at all. 2019 about Crawling follows the Shallows image of a young woman with family problems who is pushed into a dangerous mission on her own, here rescuing her father caught in a hurricane instead of rescuing herself, only to be tricked by ropes and not sharks. It’s so effective that this year’s Netflix shark show Thrash tore it up a notch, featuring sharks swimming around sunken buildings behind gators. Or consider a sudden fall, where two young women have a long history, are stable, and don’t need creatures.
The movie is all about entertaining the old survivalists, yes, but it also shows how the fishermen who do it often fall short of these shows, especially when the movies can’t afford to go out of their way to look scary. Shark movies may be the perfect offshoot of the year-round (or summer-long) Shark Week, but aside from their jaw-dropping failure, it’s hard to compete with the terrifying majesty of the real thing. Spielberg incorporated ambiguity into his work, which is defined by what we cannot see on land as we can see in water. This may not be an argument for hiding sharks as much as giving creature and human intentions space. Most of today’s shark movies are just looking for other movies to chew on.
