Jaws, Too: The Story of ‘Sharks’ Treasure,’ the Other Shark Movie Released in 1975

Open a newspaper to the movies page as spring turned into summer in 1975 and you’d have a hard time avoiding the fearsome image of a shark poised to attack. And, depending on where you lived, you might have your choice of several maneaters. Steven Spielberg’s Jaws debuted in theaters across North America on June 20, 1975 after an unprecedented and carefully coordinated marketing campaign based around the then-unusual decision to debut the film across the continent all at once, rather than letting it roll out a few markets at a time, and saturating the market with ads nationwide. The success of that approach would help usher in the blockbuster era. But in 1975, Jaws had a shadow, a remnant of a different way of making and marketing movies that Jaws would help push to extinction, but not quite yet: Sharks’ Treasure, a film whose release first preceded then overlapped with that of Spielberg’s far more famous shark tale.

The playing field was never a level one. Beyond having the full production and marketing muscle of Universal behind it, Jaws was based on a bestselling 1974 novel by Peter Benchley that both helped stir up interest in all things shark and doubled as a year-long advertisement for the film to come. Sharks’ Treasure was, to put it mildly, a smaller movie, rolled out with a less muscular push in a few markets at a time by United Artists. But in February, months ahead of both films’ release, it was possible to see them as part of the same phenomenon. “Sharks Take Over Movies,” screamed the headline of a February Copley News Service piece written by James Meade. “During 1971-72, rats and insects were motion picture box office draws,” Meade observed, referring to the success of the rat-heavy horror movies Willard, its sequel Ben, and the insect “documentary” The Hellstrom Chronicle. “Now apparently sharks have prevailed over rats and insects as movie stars.” Three might officially make a trend, but two has to count for something, right?

Yet apart from the obvious elements (sharks, boats, the ocean, etc.), Jaws and Sharks’ Treasure have little in common. One is a horror-inflected thriller directed by a generational talent expanding the boundaries of what a big-budget genre movie could do. The other is an adventure film inspired by The Treasure of the Sierra Madre that’s heavy on grit, light on polish, and very much of a piece with other, better-known (and better) films starring and or directed by Cornel Wilde, an actor and director whose credits stretched back to the 1940s. Wilde was in his sixties (though he’d shaved a few years off his official age) when he made Sharks’ Treasure, but still determined to make tough (and tough-minded) movies that put him front-and-center. Sharks’ Treasure would mark the end of Wilde’s directing career, but he’d go down fighting.

It was fighting that had gotten Wilde into acting and directing in the first place. Born Kornél Lajos Weisz to Hungarian Jewish parents in the city of Prievidza (now part of Slovakia), Wilde emigrated to America with his parents at the age of seven. In 1936, he