Box Office: Record-Crushing Run Of 'Titanic' Could Never Be Replicated Today
Box Office: Record-Crushing Run Of 'Titanic' Could Never Be Replicated Today
Nov 28, 2017 @ 11:00 AM
Paramount and Fox
Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio in James Cameron's 'Titanic,' image courtesy of Paramount and Fox
I was planning on doing a Titanic retrospective on the film’s actual 20thanniversary in about three weeks. But AMC and Dolby are aligning with Paramount/Viacom Inc. to release James Cameron’s Oscar-winning classic into 87 AMC/Dolby Vision theaters for one week only starting on Friday, with 20 of those theaters offering 3D prints. As you probably know, the Kate Winslet/Leonardo DiCaprio romantic drama opened with rave reviews and a $28 million debut weekend and then legging it like mad to an eventual $600m domestic total, along with $1.8b worldwide, which was unthinkable at the time.
Both were sky-high records back in 1997, and the film was only usurped by Cameron’s Avatar 12 years later. Titanic, which won 11 Oscars (including Best Picture), was arguably the last of its kind in terms of stupefyingly leggy blockbusters. It took advantage of an emerging overseas market (where it earned $1.2 billion overseas alone courtesy of co-producer 20th Century Fox), but it also took advantage of a period where an event movie was just that.
There are plenty of reasons why the film went insane at the box office. It was -- and still is -- a terrific and heartbreakingly moving film for one, and it indeed played off DiCaprio’s teen idol status while showcasing superb special effects in service of a classically doomed romance. Oh, and it also had relatively clear sailing for the first three months of 1998.
Yes, Titanic was already a big hit by the time 1997 ended. It opened with $28 million in that golden pre-Christmas weekend, made another $35m over its second Fri-Sun frame and then another $33m over New Years’. It had $157 million domestic (5.6x its opening weekend) by January 4. But then it just kept going and going and going.
And here’s a key item in its record-crushing run, one where it spent the first 15 weekends atop the box office: The first three months of the year were filled with old-school movies. This was 1998, where the very idea of a movie like Lost in Space opening in April was an anomaly. And while there were plenty of good movies that opened in January (Fallen), February (Dark City) and March (Primary Colors) of 1998, none of them stood a chance against the unsinkable cinematic vessel.
You had action films (The Replacement Killers), cult comedies (The Big Lebowski), star-driven thrillers (Twilight), indie gems (Zero Effect) and unapologetic schlock (Deep Rising, which essentially invented the SyFy Channel original movie). But these were small movies, some of them better than others, and they couldn’t survive against a genuine event film. Aside from Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore’s The Wedding Singer, the Fugitive spinoff U.S. Marshalls and (amusingly enough) the Leonardo DiCaprio vehicle The Man in the Iron Mask (based on the sequel to The Three Musketeers), almost everything that opened during Titanic’s initial run died badly.
Some of these movies were never going to be big hits, and some (like Dark City, Big Lebowski and Wild Things) have gone on to cult status. Titanic topped the weekend box office for 15 straight weekends, a record, falling to no. 2 only on the respective opening days of U.S. Marshalls and the rerelease of Grease. And then, in the first week of April, it lost its throne to Lost in Space, a big-budget adaptation of a popular TV show that, for its time, was a pretty huge movie to be opening one month before summer.
Without boiling Titanic’s record run to a single factor, a huge part of the equation was a relatively quiet January/February/March slate in 1998. Titanic sailed forever and ever because it was the proverbial top dog for the first 3.5 months of its release. Today we get so-called event films almost every weekend all throughout the year.
It is telling that 2018 will be something of a test run for year-round blockbusters. We’re getting big movies starting right at the beginning of the year (Insidious: The Lost Key, Proud Mary, The Maze Runner: The Death Cure) and continuing into February (Black Panther and Fifty Shades Freed), March (Red Sparrow, A Wrinkle in Time, Tomb Raider, Pacific Rim: Uprising, Ready Player One) and April (New Mutants and Rampage). And that’ll lead right into the start of the summer season before fall sees Goosebumps 2, Robin Hood, Venom and Jungle Book Origins.
Twenty years ago, even one of those movies opening outside of the summer months would have been unique enough to make them a proverbial event movie. But today they will do battle against each other in the hopes that there are enough moviegoing dollars to spread around. When you have a new would-be event movie almost every weekend, it is that much more challenging to keep screens and maintain momentum past opening weekend.
We saw that in late summer 2016 when Ghostbusters, Star Trek Beyond, Jason Bourne and Suicide Squad all took brutal second weekend plunges right on top of each other. Of course, as we’ve seen this year, the movies that do click (Get Out, Wonder Woman, Baby Driver, etc.) have been pretty leggy. But there is a difference between a 4-5x multiplier and snagging nearly six times your opening weekend in just the first two weeks and then maintaining said momentum for another 90 days.
While inflation and overseas expansion have allowed Titanic’s raw numbers to be challenged, the sheer amount of tickets sold (around 128.4 million in its initial domestic release) is still among the biggest of all time, behind only Star Wars, The Sound of Music and Gone with the Wind. Titanic was a bridge between the old-school blockbuster (a moderate opening weekend and weeks-upon weeks of huge box office fueled by word of mouth) and the new-school global hit (an expanded overseas marketplace and cutting-edge CGI). That it is still a towering cinematic achievement that makes every single life lost on that ship every bit as tragic as the eventual fates of its star-crossed lovers didn’t hurt, but that’s why it still holds up 20 years later.
I imagine that we will never see another movie perform like Titanic did two decades ago, both in terms of longevity and total tickets sold to domestic moviegoers. It had a wide-open playing field that today’s would-be event movies could only dream of. One irony is that James Cameron's Titanic lived up to the myth afforded to its title ship partially because there were no cinematic icebergs in its way.
If you like what you're reading, follow @ScottMendelson on Twitter, and "like" The Ticket Booth on Facebook. Also, check out my archives for older work
Box Office: Record-Crushing Run Of 'Titanic' Could Never Be Replicated Today
Nov 28, 2017 @ 11:00 AM
Paramount and Fox
Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio in James Cameron's 'Titanic,' image courtesy of Paramount and Fox
I was planning on doing a Titanic retrospective on the film’s actual 20thanniversary in about three weeks. But AMC and Dolby are aligning with Paramount/Viacom Inc. to release James Cameron’s Oscar-winning classic into 87 AMC/Dolby Vision theaters for one week only starting on Friday, with 20 of those theaters offering 3D prints. As you probably know, the Kate Winslet/Leonardo DiCaprio romantic drama opened with rave reviews and a $28 million debut weekend and then legging it like mad to an eventual $600m domestic total, along with $1.8b worldwide, which was unthinkable at the time.
Both were sky-high records back in 1997, and the film was only usurped by Cameron’s Avatar 12 years later. Titanic, which won 11 Oscars (including Best Picture), was arguably the last of its kind in terms of stupefyingly leggy blockbusters. It took advantage of an emerging overseas market (where it earned $1.2 billion overseas alone courtesy of co-producer 20th Century Fox), but it also took advantage of a period where an event movie was just that.
There are plenty of reasons why the film went insane at the box office. It was -- and still is -- a terrific and heartbreakingly moving film for one, and it indeed played off DiCaprio’s teen idol status while showcasing superb special effects in service of a classically doomed romance. Oh, and it also had relatively clear sailing for the first three months of 1998.
Yes, Titanic was already a big hit by the time 1997 ended. It opened with $28 million in that golden pre-Christmas weekend, made another $35m over its second Fri-Sun frame and then another $33m over New Years’. It had $157 million domestic (5.6x its opening weekend) by January 4. But then it just kept going and going and going.
And here’s a key item in its record-crushing run, one where it spent the first 15 weekends atop the box office: The first three months of the year were filled with old-school movies. This was 1998, where the very idea of a movie like Lost in Space opening in April was an anomaly. And while there were plenty of good movies that opened in January (Fallen), February (Dark City) and March (Primary Colors) of 1998, none of them stood a chance against the unsinkable cinematic vessel.
You had action films (The Replacement Killers), cult comedies (The Big Lebowski), star-driven thrillers (Twilight), indie gems (Zero Effect) and unapologetic schlock (Deep Rising, which essentially invented the SyFy Channel original movie). But these were small movies, some of them better than others, and they couldn’t survive against a genuine event film. Aside from Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore’s The Wedding Singer, the Fugitive spinoff U.S. Marshalls and (amusingly enough) the Leonardo DiCaprio vehicle The Man in the Iron Mask (based on the sequel to The Three Musketeers), almost everything that opened during Titanic’s initial run died badly.
Some of these movies were never going to be big hits, and some (like Dark City, Big Lebowski and Wild Things) have gone on to cult status. Titanic topped the weekend box office for 15 straight weekends, a record, falling to no. 2 only on the respective opening days of U.S. Marshalls and the rerelease of Grease. And then, in the first week of April, it lost its throne to Lost in Space, a big-budget adaptation of a popular TV show that, for its time, was a pretty huge movie to be opening one month before summer.
Without boiling Titanic’s record run to a single factor, a huge part of the equation was a relatively quiet January/February/March slate in 1998. Titanic sailed forever and ever because it was the proverbial top dog for the first 3.5 months of its release. Today we get so-called event films almost every weekend all throughout the year.
It is telling that 2018 will be something of a test run for year-round blockbusters. We’re getting big movies starting right at the beginning of the year (Insidious: The Lost Key, Proud Mary, The Maze Runner: The Death Cure) and continuing into February (Black Panther and Fifty Shades Freed), March (Red Sparrow, A Wrinkle in Time, Tomb Raider, Pacific Rim: Uprising, Ready Player One) and April (New Mutants and Rampage). And that’ll lead right into the start of the summer season before fall sees Goosebumps 2, Robin Hood, Venom and Jungle Book Origins.
Twenty years ago, even one of those movies opening outside of the summer months would have been unique enough to make them a proverbial event movie. But today they will do battle against each other in the hopes that there are enough moviegoing dollars to spread around. When you have a new would-be event movie almost every weekend, it is that much more challenging to keep screens and maintain momentum past opening weekend.
We saw that in late summer 2016 when Ghostbusters, Star Trek Beyond, Jason Bourne and Suicide Squad all took brutal second weekend plunges right on top of each other. Of course, as we’ve seen this year, the movies that do click (Get Out, Wonder Woman, Baby Driver, etc.) have been pretty leggy. But there is a difference between a 4-5x multiplier and snagging nearly six times your opening weekend in just the first two weeks and then maintaining said momentum for another 90 days.
While inflation and overseas expansion have allowed Titanic’s raw numbers to be challenged, the sheer amount of tickets sold (around 128.4 million in its initial domestic release) is still among the biggest of all time, behind only Star Wars, The Sound of Music and Gone with the Wind. Titanic was a bridge between the old-school blockbuster (a moderate opening weekend and weeks-upon weeks of huge box office fueled by word of mouth) and the new-school global hit (an expanded overseas marketplace and cutting-edge CGI). That it is still a towering cinematic achievement that makes every single life lost on that ship every bit as tragic as the eventual fates of its star-crossed lovers didn’t hurt, but that’s why it still holds up 20 years later.
I imagine that we will never see another movie perform like Titanic did two decades ago, both in terms of longevity and total tickets sold to domestic moviegoers. It had a wide-open playing field that today’s would-be event movies could only dream of. One irony is that James Cameron's Titanic lived up to the myth afforded to its title ship partially because there were no cinematic icebergs in its way.
If you like what you're reading, follow @ScottMendelson on Twitter, and "like" The Ticket Booth on Facebook. Also, check out my archives for older work
and saw that shyt three times in the theatre 
