On its 50th anniversary, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws can claim to be the most disruptive film of the last half-century, maybe even ever. While predecessors like The Godfather and The Exorcist drew theater lines around the block through word-of-mouth, Jaws was the one for which the term summer blockbuster was coined. Opening on a then-unheard-of 409 screens, the film caught the zeitgeist in an unprecedented manner, helped by marketing techniques that would center escapism as a staple of the summer movie season.

Spielberg’s film followed hard on the heels of Peter Benchley’s bestselling 1974 novel, with screenwriter Carl Gottlieb throwing out the book’s myriad subplots to focus on New England police chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider) and the team he assembles to stop a great white shark that is terrorizing Amity Island: intellectual oceanographer Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) and salty, no-nonsense shark hunter Quint (Robert Shaw).

In Spielberg’s hands,...