Movies Like
Movies Like Jaws for Creature Feature Fans
By Jordan A. · · 4 min read
Jaws arrives on Netflix on September 1, 2026, which means a whole new wave of viewers is about to discover why nobody wanted to go in the water in the summer of 1975. Steven Spielberg's shark thriller basically invented the modern blockbuster, and half a century later it still works, because it understands the one rule of the genre: the less you see the monster, the scarier it gets. If it sinks its teeth into you again, here are the creature features to line up next.
These range from straight-faced survival to gleeful B-movie carnage, but all of them owe something to the shark that started it.
The Meg for the bigger bite
Jaws played it terrifying. The Meg, from 2018, plays it huge. Jason Statham squares off against a prehistoric megalodon the size of a boat, and the movie knows exactly how silly that is. It is glossy, loud, and never boring, the popcorn version of the shark movie where the fun comes from scale rather than dread. When you want the creature feature turned into a theme park ride, this is the pick, and it fits right in with the popcorn spectacle on our list of the best action movies of 2025.
Jurassic Park for the awe
Spielberg took the lessons of Jaws and aimed them at dinosaurs. Jurassic Park, from 1993, is the other side of the same coin, a monster movie that makes you gasp before it makes you scream. Sam Neill, Laura Dern, and Jeff Goldblum wander an island where cloned dinosaurs have gotten loose, and the film balances wonder and terror as well as anything ever has. The kitchen scene with the raptors runs on pure Jaws logic: unseen threat, closing space, no way out. It belongs on every creature feature shortlist.
The Shallows for the lean survival
If you love how tight and simple Jaws is, The Shallows strips the formula down even further. Blake Lively plays a surfer stranded on a rock a short swim from shore, with a shark circling between her and safety. The whole movie is essentially one woman, one beach, and one very patient predator, and it wrings incredible tension out of that. At barely ninety minutes, it is the most efficient shark movie since the original, and it never wastes a second.
Deep Blue Sea for the pulp thrills
Deep Blue Sea, from 1999, is the shark movie that fully embraces its own nonsense. Renny Harlin directs a story about scientists who make sharks smarter and then, predictably, regret it. Samuel L. Jackson and LL Cool J anchor a cast that gets picked off in wildly entertaining ways, and the film delivers one of the great shock deaths in movie history. It is not trying to be Jaws, and that is exactly why it is a blast. Fans of the more self-aware side of horror will find plenty to love in our best horror movies of 2025 roundup too.
Crawl for the claustrophobia
Swap the ocean for a flooding Florida house and you get Crawl, the 2019 alligator thriller from Alexandre Aja. Kaya Scodelario plays a woman trapped in a crawl space with her injured father as a hurricane rises and gators move in. It is nasty, fast, and relentless, closer to the panic of Jaws than most shark knockoffs ever get. If the trapped-with-a-predator dread is what you crave, Crawl delivers it in a smaller, meaner package.
Building your creature feature night
Match the mood. Want the scares Jaws is famous for? The Shallows or Crawl. Want the wonder Spielberg brought to Jurassic Park? Start there. Want to just watch a big fish eat people? The Meg and Deep Blue Sea are waiting, no guilt required. The beauty of this genre is its range, from genuine art to glorious trash, and a good creature feature night usually needs one of each. For a masterclass in the quiet, hold-your-breath tension Jaws pioneered, our list of movies like A Quiet Place points to films that scare you with silence instead of gore.
Fifty years on, Jaws still sets the standard, and its arrival on Netflix is the perfect excuse to work through the movies it made possible. Just maybe wait until after your beach trip.
What Jaws taught every monster movie after it
The reason Jaws still tops these lists is that it wrote the rulebook the rest are working from. Spielberg famously had a malfunctioning mechanical shark, so he hid it, and that accident became the whole philosophy of the genre. Fear lives in anticipation, not in the reveal. A fin cutting the surface, a musical two-note warning, an empty stretch of water where something should be, all of it works because your imagination fills the gap with something worse than any prop. The best films on this list understand that lesson. The Shallows keeps its shark mostly offscreen. Crawl traps you in a space too small to see what is coming. Even the loud ones, The Meg and Deep Blue Sea, know to hold the big reveal until it counts. The failures of the genre are almost always the ones that show you the monster too early and too often, draining the dread with overexposure. Jaws proved that restraint is scarier than spectacle, and half a century of creature features have been chasing that balance ever since.
Not sure which flavor of monster you are in the mood for tonight? BingeNext sorts the creature features by dread, spectacle, or pure camp and serves up the right one. Get movie recommendations before you go back in the water.
Topics covered: jaws, creature feature, shark movies, the meg, jurassic park
About the author
Jordan A., Founder, BingeNext
Jordan A. is the founder of BingeNext and writes every guide on this site. He built the recommendation engine after one too many nights lost to the streaming menu, and he still tests every pick the hard way: by watching it.