'Into the Deep' trailer sees Richard Dreyfuss back 'in sharks' 50 years after JAWS
Shark films seem to be ten a penny these days, so how do you make them stand out from the crowd?
Easy, add in the only surviving main cast member from JAWS, which just so happens to be celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2025, the year when Into the Deep is released. This was no boat accident of casting.
However the film turns out, those marketing proportions of adding Richard Dreyfuss (who played Matt Hooper in the 1975 Steven Spielberg shark classic) were correct. But what, about the trailer, does it look any good?
The Daily Jaws dives in to take a closer look at the film directed by Christian Sesma, and alongside Dreyfuss also features Scout Taylor-Compton (Halloween, 2007) and Stuart Townsend (Queen of the Damned).
The JAWS actor features heavily in the trailer, probably as much as the shark, and why not. In film promotion terms they are both equal most valuable players.
He may have dipped his toe back in aquatic horror with a small but memorable cameo riffing on his Matt Hooper persona in Piranha 3D (2010) but here he goes the head, the tail, the whole damn thing.
As ever, there is also some past trauma, see the likes of Something in the Water (2024), The Reef: Stalked, Under Paris (2024) and Deep Fear (2023).
The latter saw Madalina Gheneait play Naomi, a round-the-world yachtswoman, who responds to a distress signal to aid a sinking boat, where she finds three survivors. Turns out they are drug traffickers who force Naomi to dive into the sunken wreck to find their cocaine, and now she is trapped between the tiger sharks attracted by the dead crew and the drug runners. This seems to swim in somewhat similar territory.
This time Cassidy (Taylor-Compton) decides to go swim in the same stretch of water looking for buried treasure with a group of divers where her dad was killed by a shark previously, facing her fear on the anniversary of his death. If only she'd spoken to the Brody family, all this could have been easily avoided.
"Face your fear to beat that fear" proclaims Dreyfuss, who comes out with more wise words in the trailer than Yoda.
Sadly it looks like Dreyfuss stays firmly on dry land and acts as a mentor type figure, likely only appearing for perhaps ten minutes across the entire film (still beating the four minutes screen time of the shark in JAWS) but the trailer makers clearly adding as much of him as possible. I mean, who wouldn't.
And so we get more of him, this time saying: "The ocean is a dangerous wonder, you're a visitor here. You are guest of their kingdom. Be careful."
Cue the shark entering the fray and attacking one of the divers. And then just when they think it is safe to have gotten out of the water, a group of modern day pirates with guns show up. There's even a helpful news reporter soundbite telling us this, just in case we were unsure.
Their real challenge is a killer great white shark that traps them in its underwater domain. Caught between the pirates and the devil in the deep blue sea, it's a battle for survival.
The tagline, "Under water, no one can hear you scream," hints at a high-stakes blend of survival and horror, whilst nodding to the tagline to Alien (1979) which was pitched as 'Jaws in space'.
We then get some nice looking shark cage action, again evoking Dreyfuss in JAWS, and then plenty of fast editing and fins, fighting and explosions.
There looks to be a heavy reliance on CGI to bring the shark to life, reflecting Dreyfuss's past comments about modernising practical effects in shark films, he once even suggesting JAWS should get a CGI makeover
Comparing any film to JAWS Is done at your own peril and is nothing but a fools errand, but when that said film does feature one of the key actors of that iconic film and a great white shark, they are of course inevitable.
This looks a very different beast of a movie to that - let's face it no shark film since has had the power of JAWS - and apart from the canny inclusion of the Matt Hooper from JAWS this will struggle to swim out of the shadow of the shiver of other sharks films that have hit screens in the last few years.
Watch it? Of course we will. Thrill at and enjoy seeing Richard Dreyfuss back in a shark film, you bet. Gripe at the CGI shark. Standard. The film itself lacking any spit and wishing he was in something better? We'll find out on January 27, when it is released to rent and buy.
Words by Dean Newman
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