Every store may have decided that it’s already time for Christmas, and there might even be snow on the ground wherever you are, but that doesn’t mean you need to give in and watch happy, comforting family movies until January. Wouldn’t it feel nice to forget any worries you have about the rapidly approaching new year and just take one trip (or maybe four trips) back to Amity Island to watch Jaws again? The nice warm sand on the beaches, the refreshing ocean water, the eating machine out there with its lifeless, black eyes chomping on unlucky bathers. If that sounds as good to you as it should, you better hurry: The whole Jaws franchise is leaving Netflix on November 15.

Yes, the whole franchise, from Jaws to Jaws 2 to Jaws 3-D to the franchise’s inauspicious conclusion with Jaws: The Revenge —a terrible movie that famously earned Michael Caine a pretty nice house. Actually, none of the Jaws sequels are very good, especially compared to Steven Spielberg’s original film (he didn’t come back for any of the sequels), but this could very well be your last chance to see them until next summer. That’s genuinely hundreds of days away, and we’re talking about cold days, days spent with your extended family, and days when you’ll stress over cooking or wrapping gifts or just staying warm. Or you could watch Jaws: The Revenge on Netflix, in which a shark actively seeks out the Brody family as payback for the death of Bruce The Shark in the first movie.

‘Jaws’ Is One of the Greatest Movies of All Time

Image via Universal Pictures

There’s never a bad time to watch Jaws, even if it is the definitive Summer Movie (because it takes place around July 4 and created Hollywood’s concept of a “summer blockbuster”). That’s likely why Netflix is okay with losing the whole series this month, since society has trained people to be less interested in sharks as the year goes on and the festivities from this summer for Jaws’ 50th anniversary have all wrapped up. But it is still a masterpiece, with more genuine scares and emotional, dramatic moments than pretty much any movie that is fewer than 50 years old. It is also the only movie to feature Robert Shaw’s grizzled shark hunter Quint, certainly one of the 10 best characters to ever grace a theatrical screen.

As for the other three movies, there’s certainly some anthropological benefit in at least putting them on in the background while you do better things. Jaws 2 is a direct follow-up to the first movie and, like a lot of horror sequels, it just kind of repeats the plot of the original (but without Spielberg’s deft hand at the proverbial helm. Jaws 3-D stars Dennis Quaid as one of the children of Roy Scheider’s Martin Brody from the first movie, and it takes place at real-life theme park SeaWorld. Jaws: The Revenge establishes that Jaws 3-D isn’t strictly Jaws canon, like David Gordon Green’s Halloween trilogy, but rather than using a fresh break from continuity to go back to basics, it features Lorraine Gary reprising her role as Ellen Brody and developing a sort of sixth sense about shark attacks. That’s approaching a Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood level of desperation.

The three sequels are all increasingly terrible, but they are also among the only Jaws movies we’ve got, and November 15 is your last chance to watch any of them on Netflix. Will you heed the warning and get your butt in the water to check out the shark, or will you ignore the advice of experts like the mayor and pretend that none of this is happening?

Release Date

June 20, 1975

Runtime

124 minutes

Writers

Peter Benchley, Carl Gottlieb

Producers

David Brown

• 

•