Rose DeWitt Bukater

Plot

In 1996, aboard the research vessel Akademik Mstislav Keldysh, treasure hunter Brock Lovett and his team explore the wreck of RMS Titanic, hoping to find a necklace known as the Heart of the Ocean. Instead, they recover a safe containing a drawing of a young woman wearing the necklace. The sketch is dated April 14, 1912, the day the Titanic struck an iceberg and sank, resulting in about 1,500 deaths. After seeing a television report about the discovery, centenarian Rose Dawson Calvert contacts Lovett, revealing she is the woman in the drawing. Hoping she can help locate the necklace, Lovett brings Rose and her granddaughter aboard the Keldysh, where Rose recounts her experience on Titanic.

In 1912, 17-year-old Rose DeWitt Bukater boards the Titanic in Southampton with her wealthy fiancé, Cal Hockley, and her mother, Ruth. Rose is unhappy in the loveless engagement, but Ruth stresses that the marriage will resolve their financial problems. Rose contemplates suicide by jumping from the ship's stern, but is stopped by Jack Dawson, a poor nomadic artist. Jack and Rose form a friendship, and Jack confesses his feelings for her. Though initially resistant, Rose realizes she has fallen in love with Jack, despite Cal's and Ruth's disapproval.

Rose brings Jack to her stateroom and asks him to draw her nude, wearing only the necklace. Afterward, they evade Cal's valet, Spicer Lovejoy, and have sex in a car in the cargo hold. On the forward deck, they witness the ship's collision with an iceberg and overhear officers discussing the severity of the situation. When Cal discovers Jack's sketch of Rose, he has Lovejoy plant the necklace on Jack, framing him for theft. Jack is arrested and locked in the master-at-arms' office, and Cal pockets the necklace.

As Titanic sinks, women and children are prioritized for the lifeboats. Rose rescues Jack, and they return to the deck, where Cal urges Rose to board a lifeboat, claiming he and Jack will board another. Cal unwittingly wraps his coat, containing the necklace, around her. As her lifeboat is lowered, Rose jumps back onto the ship, unwilling to leave Jack behind. Enraged, Cal grabs a pistol and chases them through the flooding ship, but gives up when they escape. Cal joins a lifeboat by pretending to be a child's father.

As the flooded bow sinks, the stern rises into the air, and Jack and Rose cling to the railing. The ship splits in two, and the stern sinks into the freezing water with the remaining passengers. Jack helps Rose onto floating debris and makes her promise to survive and live a full life. Jack dies from hypothermia, but Rose is saved by a returning lifeboat and rescued by the RMS Carpathia. Rose hides from Cal and her mother and gives her name as Rose Dawson on her arrival in New York City.

Cast

Fictional characters

Leonardo DiCaprio as Jack Dawson, an itinerant, poor orphan from Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, who has travelled the world, including Paris. He wins two third-class tickets for the Titanic in a poker game and travels with his friend Fabrizio. He is attracted to Rose at first sight. Her fiancé's invitation to dine with them the next evening enables Jack to mix with first-class passengers for a night. Cameron's original choice for the role was River Phoenix; however, he died in 1993. Although Jack was a fictional character, in Fairview Cemetery in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where 121 Titanic victims are buried, there is a grave labeled "J. Dawson". The producers did not know of the real J. Dawson until after the film was released.

Kate Winslet as Rose DeWitt Bukater, a 17-year-old girl from Philadelphia, who is forced into an engagement to billionaire Cal Hockley so she and her mother, Ruth, can maintain their high-class status after her father's death left the family debt-ridden. Rose boards Titanic with Cal and Ruth as a first-class passenger and meets Jack.

Gloria Stuart as the modern-day Rose Dawson Calvert. Rose narrates the film in a framing device. The elderly Rose was partly inspired by the American artist Beatrice Wood.

Billy Zane as Caledon "Cal" Hockley, Rose's arrogant and snobbish 30-year-old fiancé, who is the heir to a Pittsburgh steel fortune. He is resentful of Rose's affection for Jack.

Frances Fisher as Ruth DeWitt Bukater, Rose's widowed mother, who arranges Rose's engagement to Cal to maintain her family's high-society status. Like many aristocratic passengers portrayed in the film, her disposition is elitist and frivolous. She loves her daughter but believes that social position is more important than having a loving marriage. She strongly dislikes Jack, even though he saved her daughter's life.

Bill Paxton as Brock Lovett, a treasure hunter looking for the Heart of the Ocean in the wreck of the Titanic in the present. Time and funding for his expedition are running out. He reflects at the conclusion that, despite thinking about Titanic for three years, he has never understood it until he hears Rose's story.

Historical characters

Although not intended to be an entirely accurate depiction of events, the film includes portrayals of various historical figures:

Kathy Bates as Margaret "Molly" Brown. Brown is looked down upon by other first-class women, including Ruth, as "vulgar" and "new money". She is friendly to Jack and lends him a suit of evening clothes (bought for her son) when he is invited to dinner in the first-class dining saloon. She was dubbed the Unsinkable Molly Brown by historians because, with the support of other women, she commandeered Lifeboat 6 from Quartermaster Robert Hichens. Some aspects of this altercation are portrayed in Cameron's film.

Victor Garber as Thomas Andrews, the ship's builder. Andrews is portrayed as a kind, decent man who is modest about his grand achievement. After the collision, he tries to convince the others, particularly Ismay, that it is a "mathematical certainty" that the ship will sink. He is depicted during the sinking of the ship as standing next to the clock in the first-class smoking room, lamenting his failure to build a strong and safe ship. Although this has become one of the most famous legends of the sinking of the Titanic, this story, which was published in a 1912 book (Thomas Andrews: Shipbuilder) and thereafter perpetuated, came from John Stewart, a steward on the ship who in fact left the ship in boat no.15 at approximately 1:40 a.m. There were testimonies of sightings of Andrews after that moment. It appears that Andrews stayed in the smoking room for some time to gather his thoughts; he then continued assisting with the evacuation.

Bernard Hill as Captain Edward John Smith. Smith planned to make the Titanic his final voyage before retiring. He retreats into the wheelhouse on the bridge as the ship sinks, dying when the windows burst from the water pressure whilst he clings to the ship's wheel. There are conflicting accounts as to whether he died in this manner or later froze to death in the water near the capsized collapsible lifeboat B.

Jonathan Hyde as J. Bruce Ismay, White Star Line's ignorant, boorish managing director. With the prospect of an earlier arrival in New York and favorable press attention, Ismay influences Captain Smith to go faster; although this situation appears in popular portrayals of the disaster, it is unsupported by evidence. After the collision, he struggles to comprehend that his "unsinkable" ship is doomed. Ismay later boards Collapsible C (one of the last lifeboats to leave the ship) just before it is lowered. He was branded a coward by the press and public for surviving the disaster while many women and children drowned.

Cameos

Several crew members of the Akademik Mstislav Keldysh appear, including Anatoly Sagalevich, the creator and pilot of the Mir self-propelled Deep Submergence Vehicle. Van Ling portrayed real-life Chinese survivor Fang Lang; his backstory inspired Cameron to produce a documentary The Six, based on a group of Chinese survivors who survived the sinking. Anders Falk, who filmed a documentary about the film's sets for the Titanic Historical Society, makes a cameo as a Swedish immigrant whom Jack Dawson meets when he enters his cabin; Edward Kamuda and Karen Kamuda, then President and Vice President of the Society, who served as film consultants, were cast as extras.

Production

Pre-production

Cameron had long been fascinated by shipwrecks and felt Titanic was "the Mount Everest of shipwrecks". He was almost past the point in his life when he felt he could consider an undersea expedition, but was restless to explore the life he had turned away from when he switched from the sciences to the arts in college. After an IMAX film, Titanica (1992), was made from footage of the Titanic wreck, Cameron sought Hollywood funding for his own expedition. He said he was more motivated by a desire to see the shipwreck than to make a film.

Cameron wrote a scriptment for a Titanic film, met 20th Century Fox executives including Peter Chernin, and pitched it as "Romeo and Juliet on the Titanic". Cameron said the executives were unconvinced of the commercial potential, and had instead hoped for action scenes similar to his previous films. They approved the project as they hoped for a long-term relationship with Cameron.

Cameron convinced Fox to promote the film based on the publicity afforded by shooting the Titanic wreck, and organized several dives over two years. He also convinced Fox that shooting the real wreck, instead of simulating it with special effects, would provide value: "We can either do [the shots] with elaborate models and motion control shots and CG and all that, which will cost X amount of money – or we can spend X plus 30 per cent and actually go shoot it at the real wreck."

Undersea footage

The crew shot at the wreck, which lies in the Atlantic Ocean, 12 times in 1995. The work was risky, as the water pressure could kill the crew if there were even the tiniest flaw in the submersible structure. Additionally, adverse conditions prevented Cameron from getting footage. During one dive, one of the submersibles collided with Titanic's hull, damaging both and leaving fragments of the submersible's propeller shroud scattered around the superstructure. The external bulkhead of the captain's quarters collapsed, exposing the interior, and the area around the entrance to the Grand Staircase was damaged.

Descending to the site emphasized to the crew that the Titanic disaster was not simply a story of fiction, but a real event with real loss of life. Cameron said: "Working around the wreck for so much time, you get such a strong sense of the profound sadness and injustice of it, and the message of it." He felt a "great mantle of responsibility" to convey the emotional message of the story, as he was aware there might never be another filmmaker to visit the wreck.

Writing

After filming the underwater shots, Cameron began writing the screenplay. He wanted to honor the people who died, and spent six months researching the Titanic's crew and passengers. He created a detailed timeline of the events of the voyage and sinking and had it verified by historical experts. From the beginning of the shoot, the team had "a very clear picture" of what happened on the ship. Cameron said, "That set the bar higher in a way – it elevated the movie in a sense. We wanted this to be a definitive visualization of this moment in history as if you'd gone back in a time machine and shot it." Cameron was influenced by A Night to Remember, the 1958 British film about the Titanic which he had seen as a youth. He liberally copied some dialogue and scenes, including the lively party of the passengers in steerage, and the musicians playing on the deck during the sinking.

Cameron felt the Titanic sinking was "like a great novel that really happened", but that the event had become a mere morality tale; the film would give audiences the experience of living the history. The treasure hunter Brock Lovett represented those who never connected with the human element of the tragedy. He believed that the romance of Jack and Rose would be the most engaging element: when their love is finally destroyed, the audience would mourn the loss. He said: "All my films are love stories, but in Titanic I finally got the balance right. It's not a disaster film. It's a love story with a fastidious overlay of real history." Cameron created the character of the modern-day Rose, a survivor of the Titanic, to "see the present and the past" and "connects us in a way through history". He framed the romance with the elderly Rose to make the intervening years palpable and poignant. While Winslet and Stuart believed Rose dies at the end, Cameron said, "The answer has to be something you supply personally, individually."

Scale modeling

Harland & Wolff, Titanic's builders, opened their private archives to the crew, sharing blueprints that were previously thought lost. Fox acquired 40 acres (16 ha) of waterfront south of Playas de Rosarito in Mexico and began building a new studio on May 31, 1996. A horizon tank of 17 million US gallons (64 million litres) 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 steel plating. Within was a 50-foot (15 m) lifting platform for the ship to tilt during the sinking sequences. The 60-foot (18 m) 1/8th scale model of the stern section was designed by the naval architect Jay Kantola using plans of the Titanic's sister ship RMS Olympic. Above the model was a 162-foot-tall (49 m) tower crane on 600 feet (180 m) of rail track, acting as a combined construction, lighting, and camera platform.

Production designers faithfully reconstructed the interior rooms of the Titanic based on authentic blueprints and period photographs. The central Grand Staircase, a prominent focal point, was built to a high standard of craftsmanship; however, it was structurally reinforced with steel framework and scaled 30% wider than the original vessel to enhance the visual grandeur and facilitate filming. Craftsmen from Mexico and Britain sculpted the ornate paneling and plasterwork based on Titanic's original designs. The carpeting, upholstery, pieces of furniture, light fixtures, chairs, cutlery and crockery with the White Star Line crest on each piece were among the objects recreated according to original designs. For the ship's interiors, production designer Peter Lamont's team looked for artifacts from the era. The newness of the ship meant every prop had to be made from scratch. Cameron hired two Titanic historians, Don Lynch and Ken Marschall, to authenticate the historical detail.

Casting

Cameron said he needed the cast to feel they were really on the Titanic, to relive its liveliness, and "to take that energy and give it to Jack ... an artist who is able to have his heart soar". Established actors including Chris O'Donnell and Stephen Dorff were considered, but Cameron felt they were too old for the part of a 20-year-old. Tom Cruise was interested, but his asking price was too high. Cameron considered Jared Leto, but he refused to audition. Billy Crudup was on the shortlist and was asked to audition, but he turned it down as he was not interested and chose to star in Without Limits (1998) instead. In 2000, Crudup said that the film would not be as successful if he had starred in it. Jeremy Sisto filmed a series of screen tests with Winslet and three other actresses vying for the role of Rose. Mark Wahlberg met Cameron to discuss the part but Cameron was not interested. Matthew McConaughey, Ethan Hawke, Christian Bale, and Paul Rudd also auditioned. McConaughey was disregarded because he refused to change his Southern drawl.

Leonardo DiCaprio, then 21 years old, was brought to Cameron's attention by the casting director, Mali Finn. Initially, DiCaprio did not want the role and refused to read his first romantic scene. Cameron said, "He read it once, then started goofing around, and I could never get him to focus on it again. But for one split second, a shaft of light came down from the heavens and lit up the forest." Cameron believed in DiCaprio's ability and told him, "Look, I'm not going to make this guy brooding and neurotic. I'm not going to give him a tic and a limp and all the things you want." Cameron envisioned the character as like those played by James Stewart or Gregory Peck. After she screen-tested with DiCaprio, Winslet was so impressed she whispered to Cameron, "He's great. Even if you don't pick me, pick him." DiCaprio turned down the lead role in Boogie Nights (1997) to star in Titanic. In 2025, he said he regretted this decision, saying Boogie Nights was "a profound movie of my generation".

Cameron described Rose as "an Audrey Hepburn type". As with DiCaprio, Finn brought Winslet to Cameron's attention. Gwyneth Paltrow, Winona Ryder, Claire Danes (who had worked with DiCaprio in Romeo + Juliet the previous year), Gabrielle Anwar, and Reese Witherspoon were considered for the role. When they turned it down, with Paltrow choosing to star in Great Expectations (1998) instead and Danes feeling it was not right for her, Winslet campaigned for the role. She sent Cameron daily notes from England, which led Cameron to invite her to Hollywood for auditions. He was initially uncertain even after her screen test impressed him. Winslet sent Cameron a single rose with a card signed, "From Your Rose", and lobbied him by phone. "You don't understand!" she pleaded one day when she reached him by mobile phone in his Humvee. "I am Rose! I don't know why you're even seeing anyone else!" Her persistence and talent eventually convinced him to cast her. Cameron said Winslet "had the thing that you look for" and that there was "a quality in her face, in her eyes" that he "just knew people would be ready to go the distance with her". Winslet said of Rose: "She has got a lot to give, and she's got a very open heart. And she wants to explore and adventure the world, but she [feels] that's not going to happen."

Filming

Principal photography began on July 31, 1996, at Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. The modern-day expedition scenes were shot aboard the Akademik Mstislav Keldysh. In September, the production moved to the newly built Fox Baja Studios in Rosarito, Mexico, where a full-scale Titanic replica had been constructed. The poop deck was built on a hinge that could rise from zero to 90 degrees in a few seconds, just as the ship's stern rose during the sinking. For the safety of the stuntmen, many props were made of foam rubber. By November 15, the boarding scenes were being shot. Cameron built his Titanic on the starboard side as a study of weather data revealed it was a prevailing north-to-south wind, which blew the funnel smoke aft. This posed a problem for shooting the ship's departure from Southampton, as it was docked on its port side. Implementation of written directions, as well as props and costumes, had to be reversed; for example, if someone walked to their right in the script, they had to walk left during shooting. In post-production, the film was flipped to the correct direction. A full-time etiquette coach was hired to instruct the cast in the manners of the upper class gentility in 1912. Despite this, several critics noted anachronisms.

Cameron sketched Jack's portrait of Rose; Winslet posed in a bathing suit. Cameron felt the scene had a backdrop of repression and freedom: "You know what it means for her, the freedom she must be feeling. It's kind of exhilarating for that reason," he said. The sketching scene was DiCaprio and Winslet's first scene together. Cameron said: "It wasn't by any kind of design, although I couldn't have designed it better. There's a nervousness and an energy and a hesitance in them. They had rehearsed together, but they hadn't shot anything together. If I'd had a choice, I probably would have preferred to put it deeper into the body of the shoot." Cameron said he and his crew "were just trying to find things to shoot" because the big set "wasn't ready for months, so we were scrambling around trying to fill in anything we could get to shoot." Cameron felt the final scene worked well.

The shoot was an arduous experience that "cemented Cameron's formidable reputation as 'the scariest man in Hollywood". He became known as an "uncompromising, hard-charging perfectionist" and a "300-decibel screamer, a modern-day Captain Bligh with a megaphone and walkie-talkie, swooping down into people's faces on a 162 ft crane." Winslet chipped a bone in her elbow during filming and worried that she would drown in the 17-million-gallon (64-million-litre) water tank in which the ship would sink. She said she was sometimes afraid of Cameron's temper and that he would shout angrily at crew members. Bill Paxton was familiar with Cameron's work ethic from his earlier experience, and said: "There were a lot of people on the set. Jim is not one of those guys who has the time to win hearts and minds." The crew felt Cameron had an evil alter ego and nicknamed him "Mij" (Jim spelled backwards). In response to the criticism, Cameron said, "Film-making is war. A great battle between business and aesthetics." More than 800 crew members worked on the film.

Post-production

Cameron wanted to push the boundary of special effects, and enlisted Digital Domain and Pacific Data Images to continue the developments in digital technology he pioneered on The Abyss and Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Many previous films about Titanic shot water in slow motion, which did not look wholly convincing. Cameron encouraged his crew to shoot their 45-foot-long (14 m) miniature of the ship as if "we're making a commercial for the White Star Line". Afterwards, digital water and smoke were added, as were extras captured on a motion capture stage. Visual effects supervisor Rob Legato scanned the faces of many actors, including himself and his children, for the digital extras and stuntmen. There was also a 65-foot-long (20 m) model of the ship's stern that could break in two repeatedly, the only miniature to be used in water. For scenes set in the ship's engines, footage of the SS Jeremiah O'Brien's engines were composited with miniature support frames, and actors shot against a greenscreen. To save money, the first-class lounge was a miniature set incorporated into a greenscreen backdrop behind the actors. The miniature of the lounge was crushed to simulate the destruction of the room and a scale model of a first-class corridor flooded with jets of water while the camera pans out.

An enclosed 5,000,000-US-gallon (19,000,000 L) tank was used for sinking interiors, in which the entire set could be tilted into the water. To sink the Grand Staircase, 90,000 US gallons (340,000 L) of water were dumped into the set as it was lowered into the tank. Unexpectedly, the waterfall ripped the staircase from its steel-reinforced foundations, although no one was hurt. The 744-foot-long (227 m) exterior of Titanic had its first half lowered into the tank, but as the heaviest part of the ship it acted as a shock absorber against the water; to get the set into the water, Cameron had much of the set emptied and smashed some of the promenade windows himself. After submerging the dining saloon, three days were spent shooting Lovett's ROV traversing the wreck in the present. The scenes in the freezing Atlantic were shot in a 350,000-US-gallon (1,300,000 L) tank. The frozen corpses were created by applying on actors a powder that crystallized when exposed to water, and wax was coated on hair and clothes.

The climactic scene, which features the breakup of the ship directly before it sinks and its plunge to the bottom of the Atlantic, involved a tilting full-sized set, 150 extras, and 100 stunt performers. Cameron criticized previous Titanic films for depicting the liner's final plunge as a graceful slide underwater. He "wanted to depict it as the terrifyingly chaotic event that it really was". The actors needed to fall off the increasingly tilting deck, plunging hundreds of feet below and bouncing off railings and propellers on the way down. A few attempts to film this sequence with stunt actors resulted in minor injuries, and Cameron halted the more dangerous stunts. The risks were eventually minimized "by using computer-generated people for the dangerous falls". A Linux-based operating system was used for the effects.

Soundtrack

Cameron wrote Titanic while listening to the work of the Irish new-age musician Enya. After Enya declined an invitation to compose for the film, Cameron chose James Horner. The two had parted ways after a tumultuous working experience on Aliens, but Titanic cemented a successful collaboration that lasted until Horner's death. For the vocals heard throughout the film, Horner chose the Norwegian singer Sissel Kyrkjebø, commonly known as "Sissel". Horner knew Sissel from her album Innerst i sjelen, and particularly liked how she sang "Eg veit i himmerik ei borg" ("I Know in Heaven There Is a Castle"). He tried around 30 singers before choosing Sissel.

Horner wrote the end theme, "My Heart Will Go On", in secret with Will Jennings, because Cameron did not want any songs in the film. Céline Dion agreed to record a demo at the persuasion of her husband René Angélil. Horner waited until Cameron was in an appropriate mood before presenting him with the song. After playing it several times, Cameron declared his approval, although worried that he would have been criticized for "going commercial at the end of the movie". Cameron also wanted to appease anxious studio executives and "saw that a hit song from his movie could only be a positive factor in guaranteeing its completion". The soundtrack was the best-selling album of 1998, with sales of over 27 million.

Release

Theatrical

Distribution for Titanic was split between Paramount Pictures and 20th Century Fox; Paramount handling the domestic distribution, and Fox handling the foreign release. Both studios expected Cameron to complete it for release on July 2, 1997, "to exploit the lucrative summer season ticket sales when blockbuster films usually do better". In April, Cameron said the special effects were too complicated and that releasing the film on that date would not be possible. The studios considered pushing it to late July or the first week of August. Harrison Ford is reported to have informed Paramount, which had produced his lucrative Indiana Jones and Jack Ryan franchises, that he would never work with them again if they released Titanic so close to his film Air Force One, due on July 25.

On May 29, 1997, Paramount postponed Titanic to December 19, 1997. Its new release date would be shared by James Bond's Tomorrow Never Dies and Mouse Hunt. This led many to speculate that Titanic was poorly made. Studio executives wanted other summer blockbusters to maximize their profits, most notably Hercules, Face/Off, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, My Best Friend's Wedding, Speed 2: Cruise Control, Con Air, Batman & Robin, Men in Black, Air Force One, and Conspiracy Theory. To make up for Titanic's delay, Paramount moved up the opening of Event Horizon to August to position it as a desperately needed summer season release. A preview screening of Titanic in Minneapolis on July 14, 1997, was received positively, and favorable word of mouth spread online, creating more positive media coverage.

Cameron refused to hold the world premiere in Los Angeles. Paramount disagreed, but Fox acquiesced and held the premiere on November 1, 1997, at the Tokyo International Film Festival, where reaction was described as "tepid" by The New York Times. Positive reviews started to appear in the United States. The Hollywood premiere occurred on December 14, 1997, where "the big movie stars who attended the opening were enthusiastically gushing about the film to the world media". Titanic had a London premiere as a Royal Film Performance attended by Prince Charles.

Home media

Titanic was released worldwide in widescreen and pan and scan formats on VHS on September 1, 1998. There are two separate cassettes on this release, as the film is divided into two parts. More than $50 million was spent to market the home video release. Both VHS formats were also made available in a deluxe boxed gift set with a mounted filmstrip and six lithograph prints from the movie. In the first 3 months, the film sold 25 million copies in North America with a total sales value of $500 million, becoming the best selling live-action video, beating Independence Day. In that time, it sold 58 million copies worldwide, outselling The Lion King for a total worldwide revenue of $995 million. By March 2005, Titanic had sold 8 million DVD and 59 million VHS units. In the United Kingdom, it sold 1.1 million copies on its first day of release, making it the country's fastest-selling home video release. It held this record until May 2002, when Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone sold 1.2 million home video units on its first day. Titanic remained the fastest-selling DVD in the United Kingdom until Mamma Mia! took it in 2008. Within the first week of release, Titanic quickly beat The Full Monty, selling a total of 1.8 million home video copies. NBC acquired the US television broadcast rights for $30 million, which was considered a bargain.

A DVD version was released on August 31, 1999, in a widescreen-only (non-anamorphic) single-disc edition with no special features other than a theatrical trailer. Cameron stated at the time that he intended to release a special edition with extra features later. This release became the best-selling DVD of 1999 and early 2000. Along with The Matrix, it became the first DVD ever to sell one million copies. At the time, less than 5% of all U.S. homes had a DVD player. "When we released the original Titanic DVD, the industry was much smaller, and bonus features were not the standard they are now," said Meagan Burrows, Paramount's president of domestic home entertainment, which made the DVD performance even more impressive.

Titanic was re-released to DVD on October 25, 2005, when a three-disc Special Collector's Edition was made available in the United States and Canada. This edition contained a newly restored transfer, a 6.1 DTS-ES Discrete surround sound mix and various special features. In PAL regions, two-disc and four-disc variants were released, marketed as the Special Edition and Deluxe Collector's Edition respectively. They were released in the United Kingdom on November 7, 2005. A limited 5-disc Deluxe Limited Edition was also only released in the United Kingdom with only 10,000 copies manufactured. The fifth disc contains Cameron's documentary Ghosts of the Abyss, which was distributed by Walt Disney Pictures. Unlike the individual release of Ghosts of the Abyss, which contained two discs, only the first disc was included in the set. In 2007, for the film's tenth anniversary, a 10th Anniversary Edition was released on DVD, which consists of the first two discs from the three-disc 2005 set containing the movie and the special features on those discs.

Reception

Box office

Including revenue from the 2012, 2017 and 2023 reissues, Titanic earned $674.3 million in North America and $1.590 billion in other countries, for a worldwide total of $2.264 billion. It became the highest-grossing film of all time worldwide in 1998, beating Jurassic Park (1993). The film remained so for twelve years, until Avatar (2009), also written and directed by Cameron, surpassed it in 2010. It would hold the record for being Paramount's highest-grossing film domestically until it was dethroned by Top Gun: Maverick (2022) twenty-five years later. On March 1, 1998, it became the first film to earn more than $1 billion worldwide and on the weekend April 13–15, 2012—a century after the original vessel's foundering, Titanic became the second film to cross the $2 billion threshold during its 3D re-release. Box Office Mojo estimates that Titanic is the fifth-highest-grossing film of all time in North America when adjusting for ticket price inflation. The site also estimates that the film sold over 128 million tickets in the US in its initial theatrical run.

The 1998 North American box office set a record year for the film industry with a combined grand total of $7 billion from Titanic and numerous in-year releases including Armageddon, Saving Private Ryan, Godzilla, A Bug's Life, There's Something About Mary, The Waterboy, Deep Impact, Rush Hour, Dr. Dolittle, and Lethal Weapon 4.

Titanic was the first foreign-language film to succeed in India, which claims to have the largest movie-going audience in the world. A Hindustan Times report attributes this to its similarities and shared themes with most Bollywood films.

Titanic received steady attendance after opening in North America on Friday, December 19, 1997. By the end of the weekend, theaters were beginning to sell out. The film earned $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 number one at the box office, ahead of Mouse Hunt, Scream 2, and Tomorrow Never Dies. It would go on to break The Godfather Part III's record for having the highest Christmas Day gross, generating a total of $9.2 million. For its second weekend, the film made $35.6 million, making it the biggest December weekend gross, replacing Scream 2. By New Year's Day, Titanic had made over $120 million, had increased in popularity and theaters continued to sell out. In just 44 days, it became the fastest film to approach the $300 million mark at the domestic box office, surpassing the former record held by Jurassic Park, which took 67 days to do so. Titanic would hold this record until 1999 when it was taken by Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace. Additionally, the film reached the $400 million mark within 66 days, which was the fastest at the time, a record matched by Spider-Man in 2002. Both films were surpassed in 2004 by Shrek 2.

Critical response

Titanic garnered mostly positive reviews from film critics, and was positively reviewed by audiences and scholars, who commented on its cultural, historical, and political impacts. On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, it has an approval rating of 88% based on 255 reviews, with an average rating of 8.1/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "A mostly unqualified triumph for James Cameron, who offers a dizzying blend of spectacular visuals and old-fashioned melodrama." Metacritic, which assigned a weighted average score of 75 out of 100, based on 35 critics, reports the film has "generally favorable reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave it a rare "A+" grade, one of fewer than 60 films in the history of the service from 1982 to 2011 to earn the score.

With regard to the overall design, Roger Ebert stated: "It is flawlessly crafted, intelligently constructed, strongly acted, and spellbinding ... Movies like this are not merely difficult to make at all, but almost impossible to make well." He credited the "technical difficulties" with being "so daunting that it's a wonder when the filmmakers are also able to bring the drama and history into proportion" and "found [himself] convinced by both the story and the sad saga". He named it his ninth-best film of 1997. The television program Siskel & Ebert gave Titanic "two thumbs up" and praised its accuracy in recreating the ship's sinking; Ebert described it as "a glorious Hollywood epic" and "well worth the wait," and Gene Siskel found Leonardo DiCaprio "captivating".

James Berardinelli stated: "Meticulous in detail, yet vast in scope and intent, Titanic is the kind of epic motion picture event that has become a rarity. You don't just watch Titanic, you experience it." It was named his second best film of 1997. Joseph McBride of Boxoffice Magazine concluded: "To describe Titanic as the greatest disaster movie ever made is to sell it short. James Cameron's recreation of the 1912 sinking of the 'unsinkable' liner is one of the most magnificent pieces of serious popular entertainment ever to emanate from Hollywood." In a four out of five review, Jay Stone of Ottawa Citizen said, "The verdict: As big and glorious as the ship itself, unwieldy, unstoppable, packed with all the corny histrionics of the grand old Hollywood blockbusters and culminating in the most breathtaking maritime disaster since Waterworld."

The romantic and emotionally charged aspects were equally praised. Andrew L. Urban of Urban Cinefile said: "You will walk out of Titanic not talking about budget or running time, but of its enormous emotive power, big as the engines of the ship itself, determined as its giant propellers to gouge into your heart, and as lasting as the love story that propels it." Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly described the film as "a lush and terrifying spectacle of romantic doom. Writer-director James Cameron has restaged the defining catastrophe of the early 20th century on a human scale of such purified yearning and dread that he touches the deepest levels of popular moviemaking." Janet Maslin of The New York Times commented that "Cameron's magnificent Titanic is the first spectacle in decades that honestly invites comparison to Gone With the Wind." Adrian Turner of Radio Times awarded it four stars out of five, stating "Cameron's script wouldn't have sustained Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh for 80 minutes, but, somehow, he and his magical cast revive that old-style studio gloss for three riveting hours. Titanic is a sumptuous assault on the emotions, with a final hour that fully captures the horror and the freezing, paralysing fear of the moment. And there are single shots, such as an awesome albatross-like swoop past the steaming ship, when you sense Cameron hugging himself with the fun of it all."

Accolades

At the Golden Globes, Titanic won Best Motion Picture – Drama, Best Director, Best Original Score, and Best Original Song. Winslet and Stuart were also nominated. At the 70th Academy Awards, Titanic garnered fourteen Academy Award nominations, tying the record set in 1950 by Joseph L. Mankiewicz's All About Eve and won eleven: Best Picture (the second film about the Titanic to win that award, after 1933's Cavalcade), Best Director, Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography, Best Visual Effects, Best Film Editing, Best Costume Design, Best Sound (Gary Rydstrom, Tom Johnson, Gary Summers, Mark Ulano), Best Sound Effects Editing, Best Original Dramatic Score, and Best Original Song. Winslet, Stuart and the make-up artists were nominated, but lost to Helen Hunt in As Good as It Gets, Kim Basinger in L.A. Confidential, and Men in Black respectively. Titanic was the second film to receive eleven Academy Awards, after Ben-Hur (1959). The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King matched the record in 2004. In 2017, La La Land would tie the record for having the most Academy Award nominations. The number of nominations would be surpassed by Sinners in 2026.

Titanic won the 1997 Academy Award for Best Original Song, as well as four Grammy Awards for Record of the Year, Song of the Year, Best Song Written Specifically for a Motion Picture or Television, and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance. The soundtrack became the best-selling primarily orchestral soundtrack of all time, spending sixteen weeks at number-one in the United States, and was certified diamond for over eleven million copies sold in the United States alone. It was also the best-selling album of 1998 in the US. "My Heart Will Go On" won the Grammy Awards for Best Song Written Specifically for a Motion Picture or for Television.

Titanic also won various awards outside the United States, including the Awards of the Japanese Academy as the Best Foreign Film of the Year. It eventually won nearly ninety awards and had an additional forty-seven nominations from various award-giving bodies around the world. The book about the making of the film was at the top of The New York Times' bestseller list for several weeks, "the first time that such a tie-in book had achieved this status".

Titanic has appeared on the American Film Institute's award-winning 100 Years ... series six times.

Legacy and re-releases

3D conversion

A 2012 3D re-release was created by re-mastering the original to 4K resolution and post-converting to stereoscopic 3D format. The Titanic 3D version took 60 weeks and $18 million to produce, including the 4K restoration. The 3D conversion was performed by Stereo D. Digital 2D and 2D IMAX versions were also struck from the new 4K master created in the process. The only scene entirely redone for the re-release was Rose's view of the night sky at sea on the morning of April 15, 1912. The scene was replaced with an accurate view of the night-sky star pattern, including the Milky Way, adjusted for the location in the North Atlantic Ocean in April 1912. The change was prompted by the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who had criticized the unrealistic star pattern. He agreed to send Cameron a corrected view of the sky, which was the basis of the new scene.

The 3D version of Titanic premiered at the Royal Albert Hall in London on March 27, 2012, with James Cameron and Kate Winslet in attendance, and entered general release on April 4, 2012, six days before the centenary of Titanic embarking on her maiden voyage.

Rolling Stone film critic Peter Travers rated the reissue 3+1⁄2 stars out of 4, explaining he found it "pretty damn dazzling". He said, "The 3D intensifies Titanic. You are there. Caught up like never before in an intimate epic that earns its place in the movie time capsule." Writing for Entertainment Weekly, Owen Gleiberman gave the film an A grade. He wrote, "For once, the visuals in a 3-D movie don't look darkened or distracting. They look sensationally crisp and alive." Richard Corliss of Time, who was very critical in 1997, remained in the same mood: "I had pretty much the same reaction: fitfully awed, mostly water-logged." In regards to the 3D effects, he noted the "careful conversion to 3D lends volume and impact to certain moments ... [but] in separating the foreground and background of each scene, the converters have carved the visual field into discrete, not organic, levels." Ann Hornaday for The Washington Post found herself asking "whether the film's twin values of humanism and spectacle are enhanced by Cameron's 3-D conversion, and the answer to that is: They aren't." She added that the "3-D conversion creates distance where there should be intimacy, not to mention odd moments in framing and composition."

The film grossed an estimated $4.7 million on the first day of its re-release in North America (including midnight preview showings) and went on to make $17.3 million over the weekend, finishing in third place behind The Hunger Games and American Reunion. Outside North America it earned $35.2 million, finishing second, and it improved on its performance the following weekend by topping the box office with $98.9 million. China has proven to be its most successful territory, where it earned $11.6 million on its opening day, going on to earn a record-breaking $67 million in its opening week and taking more money in the process than it did in the entirety of its original theatrical run.

20th anniversary

For the 20th anniversary of the film, Titanic was re-released in cinemas in Dolby Vision (in both 2D and 3D) for one week beginning December 1, 2017.

25th anniversary

Titanic was re-released in theaters by Paramount domestically and Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures (through the 20th Century Studios and Buena Vista International labels) internationally on February 10, 2023, in a remastered 3D 4K HDR render, with high frame rate, as part of the film's 25th anniversary. For this version, the international prints update 20th Century's logo with the studio's current name, as a result of Disney's 2019 acquisition of the studio.

Titanic Live

Titanic Live was a live performance of Horner's original score by a 130-piece orchestra, choir and Celtic musicians, accompanying a showing of the film. In April 2015, Titanic Live premiered at the Royal Albert Hall, London, where the 2012 3D re-release had premiered.

Representation in other media

In 1998, an official tie-in computer game was released, titled James Cameron's Titanic Explorer. The educational game covered the history of the vessel's construction, maiden voyage and sinking, as well as the discovery and exploration of the wreck. The game included deleted footage from the film and extensive 360-degree video footage of the film's sets.

In 2020, a board game based on the film, titled Titanic: The Game, was released by Spin Master Games.

Scenes from Titanic have been the basis for multiple Internet memes, including one called "It's been 84 years", which features a screenshot or GIF of a close-up of modern-day, elderly Rose and is used to "express impatience with the pace of things".

In 2017, a parody jukebox musical based on the film called "Titanique" premiered in Los Angeles, written by Marla Mindelle, Tye Blue and Constantine Rousouli, and featured the songs of Celine Dion (who sang the film's theme song). The musical later transferred Off-Broadway in 2018 and later transferred to Broadway in 2026. A West End production opened in 2024.