by Mayté Rodríguez Cedillo and Fernando Favela  Arts and Culture Travel * BajaTraveler.com 
photos Courtesy ©️Academy Museum Foundation/ Emily Shur

The shark hangs above the escalators before you’ve even reached the gallery. “Bruce,” the last surviving full-scale model of the mechanical great white built for Steven Spielberg’s 1975 production, is the largest single object in the Academy Museum’s entire collection — 25 feet of fiberglass menace suspended over Level 4, a preview of what waits inside. Past the doors of the Marilyn and Jeffrey Katzenberg Gallery, Jaws: The Exhibition unfolds across 11,000 square feet, the largest exhibition the Academy Museum has ever dedicated to a single film. It closes July 26, 2026. What remains is a narrowing window to see something genuinely rare: the physical, tactile evidence of the moment Hollywood learned to think in blockbusters.

A Final Look Inside Amity Island
The exhibition moves visitors through Jaws scene by scene, organized into the same six-act structure as the film itself — from the eerie calm of Amity Island’s opening through the mounting panic on the beach to the open-water showdown aboard the Orca. More than 200 original objects fill the galleries, many on public display for the first time: Steven Spielberg’s own annotated shooting script, Joe Alves’s hand-drawn concept sketches for the shark, John Williams’s handwritten sheet music for the two-note theme that became shorthand for dread, and a recreation of the Orca itself, complete with the underwater cage and spear used in the film’s climax. Quint’s fighting chair is here. So is one of the three Academy Awards® the film won, for Best Sound.

Two of the exhibition’s interactive moments are worth building time around. Visitors can recreate the famous “dolly zoom” — the camera-forward, lens-backward shot that conveys Chief Brody’s dawning horror on the beach, a technique borrowed from Hitchcock’s Vertigo and forever after associated with Jaws. And a manual control station lets visitors operate a scale model of the mechanical shark, a small, hands-on echo of the famously temperamental original that, by breaking down constantly on set, forced Spielberg to show less and suggest more — the limitation that became the film’s defining strength.

The Day Hollywood Learned to Think Big
Here is what most visitors don’t know walking in: before Jaws, the term “summer blockbuster” didn’t exist. Studios released their prestige pictures in fall and winter, when awards voters and serious critics were paying attention; summer was a dumping ground. Jaws broke that logic open. Universal released it on more than 400 screens at once — an unusually wide release for a major studio film in 1975 — backed by a blanket television advertising campaign instead of the slow, city-by-city rollout that had been standard practice. The strategy worked almost too well: more than 75 million Americans went to see it in theaters, and Jaws became the first film in history to cross $100 million at the box office.

The ripple effects reshaped the entire industry. Studios began designing their calendars around the idea that summer wasn’t a slow season but the biggest one — a shift that, two years later, made room for Star Wars to do it again, and set the template every franchise tentpole has followed since. The exhibition’s final galleries trace that legacy directly: a wall of international release posters, a supercut of Jaws dialogue quoted across five decades of film and television, and the marketing ephemera — lunchboxes, cereal boxes, arcade games — that turned a movie into a cultural reflex. Few visitors arrive expecting a lesson in studio economics. Most leave understanding why every June since 1975 looks the way it does.

A Museum Worth a Full Day
Jaws is reason enough to come, but the Academy Museum rarely offers just one thing to see. The same visit currently overlaps with Barbie to Anna Karenina: The Cinematic Worlds of Sarah Greenwood and Katie Spencer, an immersive look at one of contemporary film’s most distinctive production design partnerships, and Director’s Inspiration: Bong Joon Ho, the museum’s first exhibition built around a single contemporary filmmaker’s creative process. Guided tours run Thursday through Sunday afternoons, with a dedicated Spanish-language tour on the first Saturday of each month, and on July 18 production sound mixer and Academy Governor Peter Devlin leads a tour examining the sound design of Jaws itself — followed by a Q&A.
Designed by Pritzker Prize–winning architect Renzo Piano, the museum’s campus pairs the restored, historic Saban Building — the former May Company department store, dating to 1939 — with a soaring spherical addition connected by glass bridges. The rooftop Dolby Family Terrace delivers sweeping views across the Hollywood Hills, and Fanny’s, the museum’s full-service restaurant, makes an unhurried lunch or dinner a natural way to close out the visit rather than rushing back into Wilshire Boulevard traffic.

Beyond the Galleries
The museum sits in the Miracle Mile, directly across from LACMA and within easy reach by Metro — the Wilshire/Fairfax station is steps from the entrance. For visitors building a longer Los Angeles itinerary around the visit, the timing carries its own quiet symbolism: late July marks both the exhibition’s final days and the unofficial midpoint of the very summer movie season Jaws invented. Plan for three to five hours inside the museum alone, longer if a screening or guided tour is part of the day.

✦ BAJATRAVELER® TAKEAWAY
Jaws: The Exhibition closes July 26 — which means the window to see Spielberg’s own annotated script, the last full-scale model of “Bruce,” and 200-plus objects never before shown to the public is now measured in weeks, not months. Pair it with the Academy Museum’s full slate of concurrent exhibitions and you have a single afternoon in the Miracle Mile that justifies the trip to Los Angeles on its own. This isn’t a detour for film buffs — it’s the rare exhibition that explains, in physical objects, why the modern movie summer exists at all.

Plan Your Visit
Jaws: The Exhibition is on view through July 26, 2026, in the Marilyn and Jeffrey Katzenberg Gallery (Level 4) at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, 6067 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles. The museum is open six days a week, 10am–6pm, closed Tuesdays. General admission is $25 for adults, $19 for seniors (62+), and $15 for students; free for visitors 17 and under and for California EBT cardholders. Guided exhibition tours run Thursday through Sunday at 1:30pm, 2:30pm, and 3:30pm, with a Spanish-language tour on the first Saturday of the month. Tickets are by advance online reservation only.
→ Visit academymuseum.org to reserve tickets and tours