Opening weekend brouhaha and the industry buzz around tracking returns can be traced to a little picture from the summer of 1975 about a hungry fish in a coastal town. The New Yorker's James Surowiecki does a little analysis of the way this summer's blockbusters have been blowing up and then whimpering out of the theaters scant weeks later. In the shouldn't-they-alert-the-studio-heads department, the following:
"'Jaws' may have opened big because Universal marketed it well and released it widely, but it stayed big because people liked it. And controlling what people like is something that even the most clever marketer can't do."