When Open Water screened at Sundance in January, USA Today said audiences might think twice about scuba diving after braving the indie thriller.
Which is exactly what worries the scuba-diving industry, as Open Water heads out to the open sea.
The no-stars bare-bones-budget film, about a workaholic couple whose dream scuba vacation literally gets thrown to the sharks, opens Friday in 19 cities.
By Aug. 20, Lions Gate, which snapped up the six-figure movie for seven figures ($2.5 million) at the Sundance Film Festival, plans to unleash Open Water--described as "harrowing" and "unnerving" by the Hollywood Reporter--on 2,000 screens, per the New York Times.
"We are concerned that it's going to have an impact on people and families who are going to consider taking up diving this summer," says Tom Ingram, executive director of the Diving Equipment & Marketing Association.
Ingram's group wasn't around in 1975, but it's familiar with a film released that summer by the name of Jaws.
Steven Spielberg's shark tale is almost as famous, or infamous, for emptying beaches as for packing theaters--a point not lost on Ingram.
"I don't think the Industry had the opportunity [to defend itself] when Jaws came out," Ingram says.
With Open Water, the dive association began steeling itself for the film's release back in February. This week, it began offering rebuttals.
"The depiction of diving [in the movie] is basically there are sharks in the water everywhere," says Ingram, who has not yet seen Open Water. "The fact is that divers don't account for a whole lot of people getting gobbled up by sharks."
Last year, the association says, no diver, swimmer, nor cautious wader was killed by a shark. In 2002, only three such fatalities were recorded worldwide.
But sharks are only half of the dive industry's potential image problems with Open Water.
The reason the film's two main characters are under siege by sharks is because they are mistakenly stranded in the ocean by a dive boat.
Ingram says the association doesn't have stats on how often this occurs because it occurs so rarely.
But rarely is not never.
Open Water is billed as "based on true events." It's widely acknowledged, though never explicitly stated in studio publicity material, that writer-director Chris Kentis and producer Laura Lau, a husband-and-wife team, used the real-life tale of Tom and Eileen Lonergan as the jumping off point for their film.
In 1998, the Lonergans, both experienced divers, were lost at sea off the coast of Australia when their diving boat returned to shore without them, its crew and fellow passengers apparently unaware the couple was missing.
The case resulted in a manslaughter trial for the boat's skipper (he was acquitted) and provided no real answers as to what happened to the Lonergans.
It was a search for answers that spurred John Hains Jr., brother of Eileen Lonergan, to attend a preview screening of Open Water on Thursday night.
"For me, this film provides a definite amount of closure," Hains said in an email interview after watching the movie. "It partially fills in a gap which I imagine a body and funeral must normally satisfy. I say partially because, obviously the film is pure speculation, and Eileen and Tom's fate is known only to them."
Of all people, Hains doesn't think Open Water should scare off divers.
"Diving is not inherently dangerous, not more than any other extreme sport. In fact, it's probably less dangerous than others," Hains said in an earlier phone interview.
Hains said his family was never contacted by the filmmakers of Open Water. He called Lions Gate himself, mainly concerned with whether the story would dredge up rumors that the Lonergans somehow engineered their own demise. It does not.
The dive industry may be wary of Open Water, but Hains, for one, is satisfied.
"I don't think anything bad can come out of the film," Hains said. "If anything, it'll make people more cautious."