2026 will be another busy, busy year for Steven Soderbergh. As per usual, the ever-prolific director has several irons in the fire: his next film, “The Christophers,” hits theaters on April 10, courtesy of NEON; there’s his upcoming “A Man Under The Influence: 63 Days of Steven’s Selects” film and cocktails series at Brooklyn’s Nitehawk Cinema locations; and then there’s his long-gestating book on “Jaws,” the release of which sounds imminent.
But Soderbergh’s “Jaws” book may not be a book any longer, or at least, not only a book. In a new interview with BKMag, the director revealed that the project, listed as “Production 02074” in his 2025 Seen/Read list, will now be released in the app format. “Well, it’s done, and it was a book, but now it’s an app,” said Soderbergh. “Because I’ve reconstructed every day of shooting, so you’re going to be able to scroll through the app and see screen grabs of every shot they got that day, so you can really see him building the movie piece by piece. And then there’s 25,000 words of me talking about the film. That’s the part I’ve been working on for a long time.”
From that description, it sounds like the app’s format will focus on the shot-by-shot chronology of Steven Spielberg‘s 1975 film, with commentary by Soderbergh accompanying screen grabs and videos of the camera movements. That’s a compelling and ingenious use of the app medium, and not the first time Soderbergh has utilized that format; look at 2018’s “Mosiac“ as another example.
The upcoming app is just the latest development in a project Soderbergh has worked on for years. “It started out as a book about directing in general, and then became a book about the shooting of “Jaws,” which allows me to digress whenever I want to, to talk about directing in general,” continued the director. “I’m waiting, literally as we speak, I’m supposed to get a beta version of the app that I can navigate and look through and give notes on. But I would have chosen it for this regardless, because it was the movie that made me want to make movies. Before I saw that film, a movie was something you went to see and be entertained by, and as soon as I got out of that film, movies were something you could do. I was switched on, and I think that movie fulfilled that function for a lot of young filmmakers.”
But will Soderbergh’s “Jaws” project also be available in book format? Another new interview with him from Letterboxd hints that this may be the case. When responding to a question about Spielberg’s influence on him as a film artist, Soderbergh said, “Absolutely, which is why I wrote a [soon-to-be-published] book [about “Jaws”], to walk people through it in maddening detail. Even that speaks to this idea of being influenced, yet not imitating.” Soderbergh averred Spielberg’s film “occupies a gigantic chunk of ‘influence’ real estate for me,” and the book/app project is a way of dissecting the levels of that influence in the most minute detail possible.
Another interesting tidbit from that Letterboxd review, an anecdote from Soderbergh of his first screening of “Jaws” and why it had the impact it did on him. “I was lucky because I saw it for the first time a couple of weeks after my, to that point, lifelong dream and ambition of being a professional baseball player died,” said the director. “And as a kid who had a somewhat obsessive personality, I was bereft. I was in a place where I was really open to something reaching in and becoming a new obsession. So, in that theater in St. Petersburg, that summer where I’d been shipped off to see my grandparents and cousins and aunts and uncles, I got transformed. And it turned out to be lucky that it was that movie because to this day, you know, I can point out the things in almost anything I’ve made and trace it back to something that was in that film.”
Stay tuned for more details on the release of Soderbergh’s “Jaws” book/app. From the sound of things, both formats may become available, but the app is where Soderbergh’s focus is right now.
