Even before its 50th anniversary Jaws exhibition debuts this weekend, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures has announced that it’s green-lit another major show from that film’s prolific director.
The first-ever Steven Spielberg retrospective exhibition will open at the Academy Museum in 2028. The Los Angeles institution announced the news at a press event on Wednesday morning for “Jaws: The Exhibition.”
“He has explored new themes and ideas, sometimes treating us to dazzling thrill rides and other times guiding us through introspective journeys into our own histories, our dreams and the depths of our own souls,” Academy Museum director and president Amy Homma said. “American cinema and world cinema would not be the same over the past half-century without Steven Spielberg.”
Homma—who was on stage to introduce none other than Spielberg himself—added that the exhibition “will not only honor the undeniable legacy of Steven Spielberg, but it will also give visitors insight into his creative process and bring them closer than ever to his filmography.”
And what a filmography that is. While you eagerly await more info on the exhibit, allow your imagination to fill in some of the gaps as you consider all of the astounding Spielberg-directed films that could factor into the show: Jurassic Park, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, the Indiana Jones franchise, Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan… we could go on and on.
If it’s anything like the upcoming Jaws exhibition, expect plenty of pieces on display straight from Spielberg’s personal collection alongside a number of loans from film studio archives and private collectors. “How did anybody know to take the buoy [from the opening of Jaws] and take it home, and sit on it for 50 years and then loan it to the Academy?” Spielberg said on Wednesday. “How did they know? I didn’t know, I thought my career was virtually over halfway through production on Jaws.”
The director, of course, has gone on to make decades’ worth of classics since then, which are already a fixture at the film museum: The Academy Museum debuted in 2021 with a full-body animatronic of E.T. and a deep dive into the foley work on Raiders of the Lost Ark. You can currently see the shaving cream can filled with dinosaur embryos from Jurassic Park, the robotic teddy bear from A.I. Artificial Intelligence and the alien ship from Close Encounters of the Third Kind on display at the museum, and you can always see Bruce—a 25-foot model cast from the original mold for Jaws—hanging above the escalators.