In fact, “Titanic” was the #1 movie in North America for 15 weeks straight, becoming an unsinkable juggernaut, the first movie to achieve anything like that since 1982 when Steven Spielberg’s “E.T.

Granted, 2,674 theaters was a lot in those days, but that first weekend confirmed some of the concerns that “Titanic” might not recoup its hefty production budget. “Titanic” opened fairly innocuously on Decemin 2,674 theaters with an opening weekend of $28.6 million, which wasn’t that impressive even by late ‘90s standards. (At that point, not a single person not involved directly with the film had seen it.) That announcement caused some concern that Cameron’s latest might suffer a similar fate as the ship and be an unmitigated disaster. The original plan was to release the movie on the 4th of July weekend, where Cameron had so much prior success with “Terminator 2.” Because Cameron was already breaking new ground with visual effects for the movie, “Titanic” lost its summer date and Paramount settled on a holiday release five months later. SEE February 2023 box office preview: ‘Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania’ sets up Marvel’s Phase 5 At that point, DiCaprio had already starred in Baz Lurhmann’s “Romeo+Juliet” but it hadn’t been released yet the 20-year-old Winlet had also made waves in smaller movies like Ang Lee’s “Sense and Sensibility,” for which she received her first Oscar nomination. There may have been some concern about him casting the younger, not quite known Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet in the roles of lovers from different classes of the ship.

The movie would be co-distributed by 20th Century Fox and Paramount with the latter handling the domestic release. (1989’s “The Abyss” was a rare flop for Cameron.) By the time the filmmaker announced he would make a movie about the sinking of the Titanic, he had built enough trust from previous hits that few blinked at the (for the times) exorbitant $200 million budget. Up until that point, Cameron was best known for sci-fi epics like “The Terminator,” “Aliens” and “Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” the latter two being enormous worldwide blockbuster hits. There will also be opportunities to see the Cameron’s 2012 3D upgrade that was produced following the success of “Avatar.” Read on for Gold Derby’s “Titanic” box office flashback.

This weekend, James Cameron‘s “ Titanic” (1997) will get a 25th anniversary re-release into roughly 1,800 theaters, allowing those who loved the movie when it was first released and those who have discovered it in the years since to see it back on the big screen.

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