If you were a person interested in movies 25 years ago, you might remember hearing that James Cameron's "Titanic" was on target to be a legendary flop. "Can a disaster epic about an epic disaster avoid the very fate it dramatizes?" asked a story in The Washington Post about six months before the movie's December 1997 opening, going on to describe cost overruns, a delayed release date, reports of injuries on the set and an extraordinarily long production period. Originally budgeted for $110 million (an enormous amount at the time), its costs ballooned to nearly twice that, making it easily the most expensive movie ever made. As Cameron's film steamed toward the multiplex icebergs, expectations seemed to sink ever lower.
And then ... well, we know what happened. It didn't matter that "Titanic" had a three-and-a-quarter-hour running time that limited the number of showtimes per day (it was, at the time, officially listed as "2 hours and 74 minutes"), or that it had an ending that everyone knew, or that it was a costume drama when conventional wisdom held that huge box-office success happened only for franchise films and science fiction. Cameron's epic folly became the highest grossing film in history, eventually earning more than $650 million — a total unsurpassed until Cameron's "Avatar" 12 years later. (It's still in the all-time Top 10 for domestic grosses, and might still earn more: A remastered 25th-anniversary 3D version will hit theaters in time for Valentine's Day.) "Titanic" famously stayed in theaters through winter, spring and into summer; many moviegoers watched it multiple times, caught up in the love story of Rose (Kate Winslet) and Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) and the spectacle of the enormous ship disappearing into those inky waters.
Like a lot of us, I saw "Titanic" in a theater 25 years ago; I wasn't a full-time writer then, so I didn't review it or take notes. I just remember sitting in the dark, caught up in a story from the past that I'd never given much thought to. More than 2,000 real-life people — rich people curious about the latest big thing, immigrants seeking a better life in America, stewards just trying to earn a living, children eager to run on the shiny wood of the decks — boarded a sparkling-new ship of dreams on a spring morning in 1912; days later, two-thirds of them died in the frigid waters of the North Atlantic after the ship hit an iceberg, their bodies and belongings sinking slowly to the ocean floor. If "Titanic" the movie had been fiction, it would have seemed absurdly overblown — a melodrama ridiculously larger than life.
