**
I saw it a couple of times a day in that swing dance Gap ad. Bet those guys who did The Matrix were ticked about that! They had one original thing in their movie, and it was scooped by a khakis commercial!
Getting back to the OP…
The main thing was that there was an astonishing “black hole” of poor movies that came out after it. People like to go to: a. The current #1 movie. b. The Brand New Big Movie Coming Out This Week. Since there was no TBNBMCOTW of note, people defaulted to a. If there had been a reasonable TBNBMCOTW after about 2-3 weeks, “Titantic” would have quickly sunk like a rock at the box office. Once it survived as #1 into mid-January when virtually nothing of note comes out until spring, it was on its way.
In other words, it was just plain lucky.
I don’t know a single person who liked it. Many people I know couldn’t stand to watch even part of it.
I think it was noteworthy that because it was banal and cliche, it gave these money-spending, inner-city teen aged girls a sense of romantic wonder and splendor in the affluence of the upper class folk who were on the ship while giving them juicy bits of lowly Leo (ooooh, Leooooo) gettin’ dirty with a swooning Winslet.
Kind of like they wished some “bad boy” would come sweep them off their feet.
That’s my take on the film’s popularity. 'Course, it’s only a guess, as I hate it too.
Well, once the hype about anything starts, there’s a certain clique of artsy-fartsy people who will spew their hatred over the thing hyped and the poor suckers who’re buying the hype, and actually enjoying it.
Books, movies, music, TV, drama, software.
“Oh I used to like X, but then it got so commercial, I can’t be bothered anymore.”
Any pale guy at a liberal arts college, with a black turtleneck who’s read way too much Kafka.
Not even close.
Hundreds if not thousands of SF stories dealt with mysticism before the Matrix. Stranger in a Strange Land, Dune, all had “mystic” elements. There was a (mediocre) three book series by Dennis Schmidt that was specifically “Eastern Philosophy in Space” (it wasn’t good, but…) Hell, it’s not even original to SF movies: the whole “Force” thing from Star Wars was mystic.
And given that the Matrix ripped off huge chunks from Jack Chalker’s three book “The Wonderland Gabit” series (In The Wonderland Gambit the main character is a computer engineer who is approached by a pretty young woman who warns him he’s in grave danger. Heavy use is made of Lewis Carroll imagery (“white rabbit”, etc.), the big revelation is that they’re living in a VR world run by a computer ) and given that Chalker was using ideas that had been played with by OTHER SF writers (Phillp K. Dick for the “Everything you know is wrong” theme and Daniel Galouye(sp) who had the first “man trapped in VR” story I’m aware of* among others, ) I boggle every time someone talks about how “original” The Matrix was. It was a badly cobbled-together bundle of ooooolllddd* science fiction cliches and a direct rip off of a specific book. It DID have that stupid “use humans as duracell batteries” bit though. That MAY be original.
And I thought I’d read that the “camera freezes/circles” thing had been done earlier in Japanese martial arts films and I know it was in some sort of commercial.
Don’t get me wrong, the Matrix is a decent action flick with some competent acting and effects. But original it ain’t.
Fenris
*Apparently so were the filmmakers: Galouye’s book was called Simulacrum 3 and doesn’t Neo hide money in a book called
cjhoworth raises such an excellent point, I felt the need to re-emphasize it. It’s impossible to ignore the flurry of documentaries, museum exhibits, and other material that accompanied the release of Titanic, which were responsible not only for drumming up interest in the movie but also getting people (including myself) interested in a little bit of history. Although I’m not a fan in general of Cameron’s attitude, he knows how to put together a movie and market it. His attention to detail in the construction of the mock ship and other period minutiae shows he was aware of the historical burdens of the story, and putting Leo in a starring role immediately sold a three-hour movie to an audience of young people with short attention spans but with money to burn. I realize I’m generalizing there, but I know when I was 13 or whatever I wasn’t about to sit through something 3 hours long unless I had something to look at, if you know what I mean.
And The Abyss rules.
Calling Leonardo DiCaprio a bad actor is a bit reckless. I will be the first to admit that his performances of late (Titantic included) haven’t struck a chord with me but his work in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape was enjoyable and he received a well deserved (by most counts) Oscar nomination.
They’re probably even more ticked about the fact that people keep mistaking that Gap ad for the same thing as the technology in The Matrix.
I tend to think that the video audience had a more profound effect than the number of people; movie going was a far more popular form of entertainment when GWTW came out (Obviously, there was no TV). There were many times more pictures released then as the market could bear it. Not to mention that GWTW was itself a ‘special event’ with tickets being more expensive for it.
I’m not trying to make the case that inflation rankings should never be mentioned, simply that people should realize they’re not unbiased.
Fenris, I think Cisco was being sarcastic. At least, that’s how I read it… perhaps I was wrong?
Another thing about Titanic was that it was helped by Valentines Day, which fell on a Saturday in 1998. It’s biggest week box office wise actually occurred 8 weeks after the movies release ($36 million!), something I don’t think has ever happened with a film with a wide release.
ftg there are a number of people on this thread who liked the movie, but then, technically, you don’t know us. :rolleyes:
Gaspode - you go! 
I had to suffer those people all throughout my days at UGA, usually bitching about REM: “They used to be great, but then they got popular and sold out.” A couple of times I used to argue with these people (“When? When “Murmur” was voted Album of the Year by Rolling Stone magazine?”), but it was breath wasted.
The number of people on the SDMB who claim it sucked and they don’t know anyone who liked it simply defies logical explanation. Just who was going to watch it? Don’t tell me they were all teenaged girls, because that’s baloney; they sure weren’t all teenaged girls when I went to see it.
I liked it. It was a good movie. So now you know one person. It was a good story well told. It was very well written, Kate Winslet is beautiful and can act as well as anyone alive, the effects were oustanding, and the sets and costumes were terrific. It wasn’t a masterpeice of cutting edge cinema, but movies don’t have to be that to be enjoyable.
Interesting. According to my calculations with the info on this site I have come up with the following numbers based on a per month income.
Adjusted for inflation (but not for change in culture)
Star Wars earned an overall average of 3.4 million a month. (25 years)
Titanic earned an overall average of 13 million a month. (5 years)
Spiderman earned an overall average of 67 million a month (6 months)
Sure, titanic earned about 200 million more dollars than Spiderman, but Titanic has been out- what 4.5 years longer. I think we have a competetor.
Adjusting for inflation, how much did the Titanic make on it’s opening weekend?
Let me second this re-emphasis:
cjhoworth said:
I think there were significant numbers of people, myself included, who went to see this film multiple times inspite of the love story (which didn’t do a whole lot for me) because of their interest in the story of the Titanic in general. Don’t underestimate how fascinated people are with this tragedy, an event that’s inspired an enormous number of books and movies. It’s still considered the largest peacetime maritime disaster in history (~1500 people died, mostly from hypothermia) and also the most ironic. If any one of a series of mistakes or miscalculations had been corrected, it might never have happened. The Titanic tragedy is also significant because of the number of life-saving maritime regulations that were spawned in its wake, including the formation of the Ice Patrol, the requirement that ships carry enough lifeboats for its passengers and its crew AND carry out mandatory lifeboat drills (one was scheduled for the day Titanic sank but was cancelled), and the requirement that wireless/radios be manned 24 hours a day (the California was close enough to Titanic to have saved most of those who went into the water but they did not hear the distress messages because their sole wireless operator had gone to bed).
While I couldn’t find the details on Titanic-related films in the cursory internet search I just did, I’m fairly certain this is the first Titanic film that came out after Bob Ballard found the wreck in 1985, so it’s the first that’s had a chance to feature footage of the ship as she looks at the bottom of the Atlantic (or did in the mid-90s; I understand there’s been a significant amount of breakdown of the wreckage since).
Personally I was more interested in the actions going on around or behind the two main characters. James Cameron took into account a number of events described by survivors and those of us familiar with the story of Titanic can see some of those events going on in the background. For example, in one seen early on you can see a boy playing with (I think) a yoyo or something similar in the background. This actually comes from one of the only set of pictures that exists of life onboard ship during that fateful maiden voyage. They were taken by a minister who disembarked in Queenstown.
The film also touched, albeit obliquely, on a number of controversies surrounding the Titanic including whether or not artifacts should be salvaged (the few remaining survivors and/or descendents of victims are mostly opposed to disturbing the site since it’s the grave of 1000+ people), how the steerage passengers were treated at the time of the disaster (the locked gates may be an exaggeration; what’s not is the fact that it was extremely difficult purely because of the design of the ship for those in third class to find the lifeboat decks), whether or not one of the crew committed suicide after killing a desperate passenger, why the White Star Liner’s owner J. Bruce Ismay was one of the few male passengers to survive, why the captain ignored all the ice warnings (was he trying to best the transatlantic record?), etc. I am disappointed that he didn’t deal with the issue of the California but I guess that would have just made the movie that much longer. Oh, and for the record, count me in as one of those people who likes her movies to be long. I paid $$, I want to be entertained for at least 2 hours and preferably longer.
Michele
Why, yes, I do own several Titanic-related books and the excellent four-part A&E Documentary in addition to the movie…why do you ask? 
I don’t know about where you live, but here, “money spending, inner-city teenaged girls” don’t exist. The ones going to see it over and over and over again were the suburban middle class girls.
Epi, your calculations and logic make no sense. What does it matter how much, per month, a movie makes since its release? 8-Mile got $54million this past week, an extrapolated $216 million a month, so clearly ITS the number one movie of all time! :rolleyes:
And there is no way Spider Man will earn more than Titanic. Its not even in theaters anymore.
How is that even close to a valid comparison? If you were going to do anything like this, you would use the months the film was actually in release but even then that means nothing. “Yeah, that Star Wars did good for awhile, but it sure sucked in earnings from 1982-1997.” :rolleyes:
I guess it’s popular with some people to sneer at something just because it’s popular. Of course, if you saw the movie, and truly disliked it, that’s absolutely ok.
However, hubby and I saw it (I dragged him kicking and screaming I might add), and both really enjoyed it. The sets were wonderful, costumes were great, and its many statements about he human condition were well depicted. Didn’t buy it on video, but am still prone to watching bits and pieces on TV if I happen to catch it.
BTW, I really thought my Mother-in-law would like the film. She wouldn’t go see it because she “Knows how it ends”, I said that’s BS. Everyone knows how the Civil War ended, but she still enjoyed GWTW!
I didn’t find Titanic either particularly good or bad. I thought the love story was trite and the class-warfare theme crude but the final half-hour where the ship sinks was very effective and really conveyed the horror and chaos of what it must have been like.(and I don’t normally go for long action sequences).
Having said that it is always interesting to try to figure out why a particular film succeeds. And Titanic’s success was phenomenal. You just have to compare the worlwide gross of Titanic to its nearest competitors of recent years, Harry Potter, TPM, LOTR etc. and they aren’t even close. You have to go back to Star Wars and ET (after adjusting for inflation) to get something close.
I think it’s clear from this thread that the success was due to a variety of factors; let’s summarize them:
1)The teenage female angle: Leonardo di Caprio,romance etc. Clearly this was important. But it can’t have been the only factor since no other romance film in recent years has done remotely as well. Note that all the other blockbusters after Titanic are in the sci-fi/fantasy/action vein.
2)The famous story: Cleary this drew in a lot of older folk. As noted Titanic may be the most famous disaster in history.
3) Great action sequences: A look at other recent blockbusters shows that you have to have strong action sequences and IMO Titanic delivered here. This was probably the big edge that Titanic had over other romance films.
4) Populist message: Like I said personally I found this crudely done but the class-warfare theme in the film seems to have resonated with a lot of people.
5)International appeal: Of course most Hollywood blockbuster do well abroad but Titanic seems to have done especially well abroad. I am not sure why but perhaps it’s because Titanic was an international story and widely known especially in Europe. The film was also hugely popular in Japan; and I have read speculation that the theme of a self-sacrificing hero resonates strongly in Japanese culture.
So in sum Titanic succeeded because of a combination of factors and not for any one reason. If you wanted to reduce it to a formula it might be: Take a famous historical episode with action potential (eg… a war or a disaster) .insert a romantic angle and add a populist message.
Not a recipe for a particularly good film of course. I think that Pearl Harbor may have been one attempt with this formula though nowhere near as successful.
Which other potential films could repeat the Titanic formula? Another Civil War romance a la GWTW ? A San Francisco Earthquake film?
I am not sure but my guess is that if any film beats Titanic it will be something along those lines rather than a Star Wars/LOTR kind of film.
Generally, having a strong appeal to both females and males helps. All of the top 10 (adjusted) films have this crossover appeal, though it might be argued that Star Wars appealed far more to males than females. Spectacle also is important in the box office: none of those films are small, art-house movies with no eye candy - The Exorcist comes closest, but there was a lot of visual shocks in that film, so you can say the candy was of a different flavor.
Also, like Cyber said above, it helps for a film to appeal to both younger and older viewers: it would be very hard for a strictly “adult” film (like Howards End) to be an all-time blockbuster. In BO Mojo’s list of top-20 domestic (non-adjusted) movies, the only film that probably wouldn’t attract the teen and pre-teen set is Forrest Gump (that’s an opinion, I haven’t the slightest idea of whether that is factually substantiated).
So, Titanic was big for a lot of reasons, but the biggest reason is that it had didn’t get typed as being for any one specific segment of the audience: It wasn’t a kids movie, it wasn’t a serious “adult” movie, it wasn’t just an action flick, it wasn’t just a romance, it was all those things and more.
Well, actually there was television, albeit only in New York. In fact, the NYC opening of Gone With the Wind (shortly after the Atlanta premiere) was covered live on television in December 1939.
But more to the point, almost every household in the U.S. had a radio by 1939, and that was regularly turned on for entertainment just as we watch television today.