Seeing Titanic with a crowd, even to this day (and it’s been rereleased twice in theaters, in 20), reinforces just how special the finale is. Yes, Rose’s reunion with Jack in her mind is a fantasy, but it’s one that’s baked into the grand, nostalgic storytelling style Cameron employs throughout the film, a fully earned postcredit to love found and lost but never forgotten. Cameron conjured a doomed love affair that had its cake and ate it too, both killing Jack and bringing him back to life, and yet neither of those choices felt forced. It’s hard to overstate just how weirdly daring Titanic’s conclusion is, even 20 years on. And a perfectly happy ending for him and Rose would have felt too easy. Jack’s death was sad, to be sure, but felt appropriate given the larger tragedy of the shipwreck.
I was so spellbound by the movie’s staggering scale that the romance, to a preteen boy (I was 11 at the time), seemed of secondary importance. I didn’t really process the final sequence when I saw Titanic in theaters on opening weekend for the first time. Young Rose appears in a white dress, climbs the boat’s iconic grand staircase, and reunites with Jack, as the rest of the ship’s passengers and crew (minus the story’s antagonists) applaud joyously. There’s an epilogue in which the older Rose (Gloria Stuart) bids Jack a final farewell and goes to sleep, and we’re treated to one last sequence: a dream (or perhaps a metaphorical vision of the Great Beyond, if you buy the theory that Rose dies at the end of the film) in which the wreck of the Titanic is restored to its former splendor. The real ending, of course, comes a bit later. And they did so in spite of the fact that the last hour is intense, killing off most of the ensemble and having Jack die in such wrenching fashion by freezing to death in the ocean. So why did it end up being so profitable? In part because people kept going back to see the movie again. Its opening weekend garnered a modest $28 million-solid, but indicative of a film that would make around $100–$150 million, rather than its final domestic total of $600 million. It’s worth noting that Titanic wasn’t an instant success. You’ve Never Heard John Coltrane Like This Before David A. But more than that, Cameron had brilliantly taken the true-life tale of the most famous shipwreck in the world, inserted a tragic star-crossed couple-the soulful artist Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) and the society girl Rose (Kate Winslet)-and yet somehow managed to give his film a happy ending. Titanic was something audiences hadn’t experienced before: an extravaganza of visual effects and high-octane action, crossed with a romance so broad and appealing it seemed ripped from a dime-store novel. “Nobody was playing for the upside, myself included.” Yet the film went on to become a record-breaking sensation, grossing more than $2 billion worldwide. “Everyone thought they were going to lose money,” he remembered years later. What Cameron delivered was an epic that recalled Hollywood’s golden age as much as it did the action-packed thrillers that the director was better known for making. And to fire me, you’ll have to kill me.”Īll of the trouble, it seems, was worth it. When Fox (who funded the project, along with Paramount) asked him to cut the movie down, Cameron responded in typically bellicose fashion: “If you want to cut my film, you’ll have to fire me. Filming had taken weeks longer than expected, and the final cut of the movie came in at a gargantuan three hours and 15 minutes. James Cameron’s long-planned project about the 1912 sinking of the RMS Titanic had gone over budget (it cost $200 million, at that time a record, after being green-lit for $109 million). When Titanic hit theaters 20 years ago, the widely held view in Hollywood was that it would be a financial disappointment.
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