Film Trivia Fact Check: Did Michael Caine buy a terrific house with his Jaws: The Revenge paycheck?

"I have never seen the film, but by all accounts it was terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific."

By Tim Lowery | May 3, 2025 | 12:00pm

Photo: Universal Pictures

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Film Trivia Fact Check: Did Michael Caine buy a terrific house with his Jaws: The Revenge paycheck?

In a certain, ever-expanding corner of the galaxy, May 4 marks Star Wars Day. But here at The A.V. Club, we’re spending this weekend diving into the fourth entries that reset franchises, broke a pop culture curse, or wrapped things up in a gratifying manner. Read on, and May The Fourth Installment Be With You.

The internet is filled with facts, both true and otherwise. In Film Trivia Fact Check, we’ll browse the depths of the web’s most user-generated trivia boards and wikis and put them under the microscope. How true are the IMDb Trivia pages? You want the truth? Can you handle the truth? We’re about to find out.

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Claim: “Michael Caine said [of shooting Jaws: The Revenge that he] ‘won an Oscar, built a house, and had a great holiday. Not bad for a flop movie.’ He was paid $1.5 million for seven days work in the Bahamas, and the schedule was so tight that the producers were unable to spare him so he could attend the Academy Awards, and he went on to win the Best Actor in a Supporting Role Oscar for Hannah And Her Sisters (1986).” [Source: IMDb]

Rating: (Mostly) highly likely

Context: There is a quote from Michael Caine about working on Jaws: The Revenge (the fourth and final film in the series), one that’s so fantastic that it feels like “too good a story to check out,” to reference season five of The Wire: “I have never seen the film, but by all accounts it was terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific.”

Brilliant stuff. This writer remembers coming across the remark in pop-culture pieces in the 2000s as a cynical, if amusing, anecdote about paycheck jobs, art, and commerce, one that seemed to say, “It’s cute that you want to know about a film that you look down upon. But I’ve never seen the thing, don’t think about it, and it bought me just one of my many lovely houses. So who’s the one who should really be judged here?” Nowadays, the quote pops up in frothy lists with headlines like “Movie sequels that should have never been made” or “Actors who hated their movies” or “Movies you should never see.”

The quote appears to come from Caine’s autobiography from the early ’90s, What’s It All About? (h/t to one of those aforementioned lists and this blog. (Here’s a snippet from The New York Times‘ review of the memoir from December 1992: “Mainly [Caine] mentions the more than six-dozen films he has made, boasts about the women he has slept with, and lists the names of the many famous people he has got to know along the way.” And per The Times, it was even printed in book form again in 2005 in Michael Caine: A Class Act by Christopher Bray, with the author apparently dropping the quote twice, according to the review, “on page four and again, lest we forget, on page 232.” And Caine himself has told some version of the story on chat shows throughout the decades.

But did Sir Michael Caine actually buy a house with his fee for that film? Or is this just a really good “print the legend” cocktail-party story, with the rub being that he could have? Is it a too-tidy tale that doesn’t hold up under scrutiny? In a NYT piece from 1996, one in which the actor talks incredibly candidly about his finances, his approach to accumulating wealth, and his love of owning restaurants, Caine says he had three houses at the time of publication and discusses one of them that he had to give up six years earlier. “His biggest financial setback, a $1 million loss on a home he bought in Los Angeles in 1990 for $3 million, and sold this year for $2 million, still galls him. ‘That loss will be with me forever,’ he said ruefully. ‘I thought I had bought at the bottom of the market, but I was wrong.'”

The IMDb rumor above suggests he was paid $1.5 million for his turn in Jaws: The Revenge—so half of that dwelling’s price tag—so that doesn’t seem to be the one. What’s more, that L.A. abode was purchased a good three years after shooting wrapped.

But in 2019 (the same year that Forbes reported he put his Surrey Hills estate, which boasts “a main house, two cottages, an athletic center with indoor pool, and many acres of landscaped gardens” as well as a pretty sweet foreign Hannah And Her Sisters poster, on the market), Caine sat down for a chat on the Australian talk show Andrew Denton’s Interview. And the man himself—again, coming off as notably forthcoming for a Very Famous Actor—clears most of this up and puts a much sweeter spin on it, too, with this exchange:

Denton: “When you bought [your mom] her first house, what was that like for you?”

Caine: “Oh, that was incredible for me, for my mother to have a house. ‘Cause we grew up in council houses, you know.”

Denton: “She was worried you couldn’t afford it.”

Caine: “What I did is…one of the worst pictures I did, it was a picture…I think it was called Jaws 4.”

Denton: “The Revenge.”

Caine: “The Revenge, yeah. I had a little part in that. And I was paid a million dollars for two weeks’ work. And with that money, I bought her the house. Someone said to me, ‘I saw that Jaws 4. It stinks.’ I said, ‘I haven’t seen it, but I’ve seen the house it bought my mother, and it’s marvelous [laughs].”

So there you (mostly) have it: He claims he got paid $1 million, not $1.5 million; he said he worked on the movie for two weeks, not one; and he bought the house for his mom, not himself. (He did, yes, win the Best Supporting Actor Oscar on March 30, 1987, but didn’t attend because of filming in the Bahamas. As far as never seeing Jaws: The Revenge in the 38 years since it hit theaters, you’d have to ask him.) It’s tough to think of why he would downplay or fib about any of this, so his take feels sturdy enough for this column and you can consider this a Hollywood anecdote that rings true. And now, here are some awesome impressions of the guy from The Trip.