It looks like that this year cinephiles won’t have any difficulty in deciding how to spend Valentine’s Day. The remastered version of Golden Globe-winning Titanic is to be released in theaters on February 10, just ahead of Valentine’s Day weekend.
Now considered one of the greatest love story movies of all times, Titanic was released in 1997, and in addition to becoming the first film to make over $1 billion at the global box office, it brought James Cameron his first Golden Globe for Best Director in 1998. Titanic remained one of the highest-grossing films of all times for over a decade until the release of Avatar, another movie by Cameron, that garnered him his second Golden Globe for Best Director in 2010.

Titanic was the most expensive film ever made at the time of its release with a budget of $200 million, and it even cost more than the RMS Titanic itself. The cost to construct the ship of such a scale in 1910s was roughly equivalent to $120-150 million in 1997. Titanic remained the most popular film in theaters for several months, and according to IMDb, due to its long theatrical run, Paramount Pictures sent out replacement reels to theaters that had literally worn out their copies.
Cameron, who is a professional diver, went on 12 dives to the real Titanic himself, and this emotional experience of seeing a sunken legendary ship inspired him.
Titanic was released on Friday, December 19, during the holiday season of 1997. So why is its 25^th anniversary celebrated on Valentine’s Day? Cameron has a very precise answer to this question. In one of his recent interviews Cameron explains: “The date that made sense to me was Valentine’s Day, because in the original release, which was 1997 into 1998, we came out a few days before Christmas. […] But the highest-grossing single day of the release was Valentine’s Day.”
Apart from the nostalgic impulse to take a walk down cinematic memory lane in stunning 4K resolution, those movie goers who watched Titanic on big screens in the end of 1990s now have a perfect opportunity to share this amazing experience with younger generations of millennials, zoomers and even gen alpha.
And there are few reasons for Titanic to still be relevant and highly anticipated in 2023 after its quarter-century existence in modern culture and despite its three-hours-plus running time. Its genre of a period-drama-slash-disaster-movie-based-on-a-true-story dissolves any gender or age bars and makes it ultimately universal and evergreen. People loved and will keep on loving watching the story of Rose and Jack’s forbidden love doomed by inevitability of a fatal crash.

Titanic raised a lot of questions twenty-five years ago: many of them are still relevant including feminism, abusive relationships, and mental health issues. Winslet’s Rose is a strong young woman who challenges the rules of patriarchal society she was born into. She prefers suicide to living a life of a trophy wife but instead of judging her, Cameron offers her an alternative. And Rose makes a journey from a depressed person to a confident young woman who know what she is living for.

There were several actors in contention for the iconic roles, including Matthew McConaughey, Christian Bale, Gwyneth Paltrow, Claire Danes, and others. But Cameron chose 20-something Golden Globe nominees Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet for the roles of Jack and Rose, who became one the most iconic movie couples of all times.

Titanic skyrocketed careers of these young actors making them both mega-stars and household names. Moreover, there is still a controversy around the polemic if Jack could have survived the journey by staying on the floating door with Rose. For those who still debate, National Geographic just debuted a special titled Titanic: 25 Years Later with James Cameron that captures director stating: “Jack might have lived, but there’s a lot of variables.”