Titanic is a [1997 in film1997] American romantic film directed, written, co-produced and co-edited by James Cameron about the sinking of the RMS Titanic. It features Kate Winslet as Rose DeWitt Bukater, and Leonardo DiCaprio as Jack Dawson, two members of different social classes who fall in love aboard the ill-fated voyage of the ship. The main characters and the central love story are fictional, but some characters (such as members of the ship's crew) are based on real historical figures. Gloria Stuart plays the elderly Rose, who narrates the film in a modern day framing device.
Production of the film began in 1995, when Cameron shot footage of the real wreck of the RMS Titanic. He envisioned the love story as a means to engage the audience with the real-life tragedy. Shooting took place at the Akademik Mstislav Keldysh - which aided Cameron in filming the real wreck – for the modern scenes, and a reconstruction of the ship was built at Playas de Rosarito, Baja California. Cameron also used scale models and computer-generated imagery to recreate the sinking. Titanic became at the time the most expensive film ever made, costing approximately US$200 million with funding from Paramount Pictures and 20th Century Fox. Both studios were nearly bankrupted during production.[citation needed]
The film was originally to be released on July 2, 1997, but post-production delays pushed back the film's release to December 19, 1997. After this news broke, the news media believed that Titanic would fail and take Fox and Paramount with it. Upon release however, the film turned out to be an enormous critical and commercial success, winning eleven Academy Awards, including Best Picture. It became the highest-grossing film of all time, with a worldwide total of $1.8 billion (it is the sixth-highest grossing in North America once adjusted for inflation.)
James Cameron was fascinated by shipwrecks, including the RMS Titanic, and wrote a treatment for a film.[13] He described the sinking of the Titanic as "like a great novel that really happened." Yet, over time he felt that the event had become a mere morality tale, and described making the film as putting the audience in an experience of living history. Cameron described a love story as the most engaging part of a story. As the likable Jack and Rose had their love blossom and eventually destroyed, the audience would mourn the loss. Lastly, Cameron created a modern framing of the romance with an elderly Rose, making the history palpable and poignant.[12] The treasure hunter Brock Lovett is meant to represent those who never connected with the human element of the tragedy.[10] Cameron wanted to honor the people who died during the sinking, and he spent six months fully researching what happened, creating a timeline of all the Titanic's crew and passengers.[12]
Production
He met with 20th Century Fox, and convinced them to make a film based on the publicity afforded by shooting the wreck itself[13] and organized a dive to the wreck of the Titanic over two years.[12] The crew shot in the Atlantic Ocean twelve times in 1995, shooting during eleven of those occasions, and actually spent more time with the ship than its passengers. Afterwards, Cameron began writing a screenplay.[13] Harland and Wolff, the RMS Titanic's builders, opened their private archives to the crew, sharing blueprints that were thought lost. For the ship's interiors, production designer Peter Lamont's team looked for artifacts from the era, though the newness of the ship meant every prop had to be made from scratch.[14] Fox acquired 40 acres (160,000 m2) of waterfront south of Playas de Rosarito in Mexico, and began building a new studio on May 31, 1996. A seventeen-million-gallon tank was built for the exterior of the reconstructed ship, providing 270 degrees of ocean view. The ship was built to full scale, but Lamont removed redundant sections on the superstructure and forward well deck for the ship to fit in the tank, with the remaining sections filled with digital models. The lifeboats and funnels were shrunk by ten percent. The boat deck and A-deck were working sets, but the rest of the ship was just steel plating. Within was a fifty-foot lifting platform for the ship to tilt during the sinking sequences. Towering above was a 162 feet (49 m) tall tower crane on 600 feet (180 m) of railtrack, acting as a combined construction, lighting and camera platform.[10] After shooting the sinking scenes, the ship was then dismantled and sold for scrap metal to cover budgetary costs.[15]
Box office
The film received steady attendance after opening in North America on Friday, December 19, 1997. By the end that same weekend, theaters were beginning to sell out. The film debuted with $8,658,814 on its opening day and $28,638,131 over the opening weekend from 2,674 theaters, averaging to about $10,710 per venue, and ranking #1 at the box office, ahead of the 18th James Bond film, Tomorrow Never Dies. By New Year's Day, Titanic had made over $120 million, had increased in popularity and theaters continued selling out. Its biggest single day took place on Valentine's Day 1998, making over $13 million on that day, more than six weeks after it debuted in North America. After it was released, it stayed at #1 for 15 consecutive weeks in the U.S. box office, which was a record. By March 1998, it was the first film to earn more than $1 billion worldwide.[31] The movie stayed in theaters in North America for almost ten months before finally closing on Thursday October 1, 1998 with a final domestic gross of $600,788,188, and making double that amount overseas with an international gross of $1,248,025,607. The film accumulated a grand total of $1,848,813,795 worldwide, and to this day Titanic retains the record as the most successful box office film in history, unadjusted for inflation.
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