"Jaws" was seen as a guaranteed flop, so Martin Scorsese took Steven Spielberg for a drive the day it came out, to cheer him up and show him just how long the theater lines stretched

I will be watching HBO's documentary "Spielberg" in the coming week but this tidbit from /Film is a fun fact of the phenomenon that was "Jaws."

"In one of the doc’s most delightful moments, Spielberg and Martin Scorsese both recount how when Jaws first swam into theaters, Scorsese suggested they take a little drive. The rumor around Hollywood was that Jaws might sink rather than swim. “The word around town was that Jaws was a folly, and that it was going to be a disaster,” Scorsese says. But Spielberg and Scorsese hopped in a car and drove from theater to theater in Los Angeles and saw massive, blockbusting lines that stretched for miles, all waiting to see Jaws. It was proof that Jaws was going to be a monster-sized hit, and that Spielberg was about to become a huge director."

[/Film]