Discovery’s Shark Week has been delivering seven days of shark-filled TV every summer for more than thirty years now, but this summer of the 2025 TV schedule really stands out on the shark front thanks to the 50th anniversary of Jaws. The anniversary was almost exactly one month before Shark Week familiar face Paul de Gelder took the screen for his How to Survive a Shark Attack special, so I seized my opportunity during Discovery’s press day to ask for his take on the beloved film that did not quite accurately portray great white shark behavior.
Shark Week couldn’t have recruited a better leading man for How to Survive a Shark Attack than Paul de Gelder, as he quite literally has survived a shark attack. He lost a hand and a leg after being attacked by a bull shark, and he put his knowledge to use in this particular Discovery special. When I spoke with de Gelder for Shark Week 2025, which kicked off with Tom Bergeron’s Dancing with Sharks (to mixed reactions from viewers), he weighed in on how Jaws has affected popular opinions about sharks:
I love Jaws. I think it’s one of the best movies ever made. And my concern is not about Jaws the movie or any other shark movie. It’s in people that can’t tell reality from fiction. I think we should be more concerned about those folk. Jaws came out in 1975. There wasn’t any internet, we didn’t have phones, mobile phones and all that stuff. We just kind of relied on what the media could feed us in the local newspaper or the news. Now we have the wealth of the world’s knowledge within a few keystrokes.
It sounds like Paul de Gelder would agree with CinemaBlend ranking the nightmare-inducing Jaws as one of the best horror movies of all time! He pointed out that the world was a very different place back in 1975, and director Steven Spielberg himself shared his regret that Jaws led to the mass killing of real-life sharks (which are much more functional than the movie’s great white). Nowadays, as the attack survivor pointed out, it’s very important to tell reality from fiction when it comes to these animals.
Max subscription as well as other Shark Week installments of 2025. This was only one of several specials featuring de Gelder this week, with others including Air Jaws: The Hunt for Colossus, Black Mako of the Abyss, and the upcoming Bull Shark Showdown on July 25. Shark Week will wrap this year on July 26.