The Meg is on the loose again—but are shark movies even scary anymore?
Sure, the ocean is frightening and sharks are frightening, but movies about sharks just don't have the bite they used to

In the nearly 50 years since Steven Spielberg’s Jaws first made everyone scared to go swimming, we’ve had to deal with a lot of things scarier than sharks. Just recently we had that whole global pandemic, an insurrection partially thwarted only by the incompetence of the conspirators, and that terrifying video of the cop flying way too fast down a slide. Plus, everyone knows you can bop a shark on the nose and get it to back off, and we have clear evidence that there are easier ways to die in the ocean than getting eaten by a shark.
So are shark movies still scary? Jon Turteltaub’s first The Meg tried to make the case that they are, specifically by making the shark really big, but the slick sci-fi sheen of that movie kept it from feeling as real as Jaws did in the ’70s. And as great as the marketing was, with the main poster doing a riff on the iconic Jaws one but with an impossibly large shark about to swallow an unsuspecting swimmer, it didn’t do the movie any favors since the actual shark didn’t seem that big. Maybe it was because the whole thing was CG, unlike Bruce in Jaws, but the advertising promised a shark bigger than you could imagine, a shark that could swallow all of Amity Island in one mighty chomp, a shark so big that it couldn’t be defeated by a nerd, a beach cop, and a grizzled fisherman. No, the only person who could defeat this shark was Jason freakin’ Statham.
That’s not to say the shark in The Meg was small. It was apparently somewhere between 60 and 80 feet long, which is quite a bit longer than scientists think real megalodons ever got and much longer than the average great white shark. Now Meg 2: The Trench is ratcheting everything up with more Megs, bigger Megs, and octopus monsters, but it still doesn’t seem all that scary. If you were scooting along in a paddleboat and a Meg came along, it certainly would be scary, but also… what are you going to do? It’s just going to swallow you no matter what.