Just when you thought it was safe … the shark movie is back for more
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- The 2026 shark movie slate includes six titles so far this year — The Devil's Mouth (Prime Video), Above & Below (VOD), The Bay, Chum (June, starring Alice Eve), Deep Water (May), and Netflix hit Thrash — even as Discovery Channel's Shark Week still runs its customary seven days.
- Renny Harlin's Deep Water combines a plane-crash survival narrative with sharks and is positioned by the source as a companion piece to (not a sequel of) his 1999 Deep Blue Sea; critics find the sharks feel like afterthoughts compared to the crash sequence.
- Jaws is repeatedly called the genre's single agreed-upon masterpiece that's near-impossible to match, with three follow-ups described as 'increasingly ludicrous and cheap brand extensions' capped by the 1987 nadir Jaws: The Revenge.
- Deep Blue Sea (1999) and The Shallows (2016) are singled out as the strongest post-Jaws entries — the former going bigger/faster/crazier with genetically modified sharks, the latter stripping down to mostly Blake Lively stranded on a rock.
- The Devil's Mouth (starring Kathryn Newton and Lana Condor) follows the stripped-down Shallows template with friends in Thailand, while Above & Below (featuring Antonio Banderas) pairs cage-diving with criminals and borrows from Sharknado and 47 Meters Down.
- Crawl (2019) and Fall are cited as effective 'shark-style' survival thrillers that don't actually feature sharks — Crawl uses alligators, Fall uses height — and Thrash is flagged as essentially a shark-swapped remake of Crawl.
Why it matters: Six 2026 shark releases are chasing an audience that has already crowned Jaws as untouchable, while the source notes that even big-budget attempts like Jason Statham's Meg movies look 'pretty crummy' and the genre's best recent entries — Crawl and Fall — don't feature sharks at all. For studios weighing the next shark pitch, the piece's own evidence suggests the smartest survival thrillers have already moved on to alligators, heights, or plane wrecks.
