A.V. Club: There may never be a box office hit like Titanic ever again

quote:

---

Through pure dollars and cents, it would be hard to claim that Titanic is still the biggest movie of all time. It had a good run, certainly: For a dozen years, nothing approached the enormous domestic and international box office of James Cameron’s Oscar-winning epic about the unsinkable ship that sank. But then came Avatar, Cameron’s other overlong, over-budget, state-of-the-art adventure romance, which quickly surpassed the titanic earnings of Titanic in both the United States and the rest of the world. Eight years later, Avatar is still the global champ. Here in the states, the title now belongs to Star Wars: The Force Awakens, with poor Leo and Kate now floating in the icy waters of third place. Even inflation can’t save Titanic’s top spot in the record books: It’s squarely no. 5 when you adjust the grosses, sandwiched between E.T. and The Ten Commandments on the list of all-time hits.

So, no, Titanic isn’t king of the world anymore. Except maybe it is, at least on a more fundamental level. Maybe there’s still a case to be made for the super-sized disaster weepie as the ultimate multiplex sensation—a phenomenon that dominated the public imagination in a way that Avatar or The Force Awakens never could. To understand why Titanic remains special, you have to look past the total sum of money it earned, even relative to changing ticket prices. You have to look to a different kind of box-office record, one that hasn’t been equaled since and maybe never will be. You have to remember that Titanic was the no. 1 movie in America for 15 consecutive weeks.

Just stop and think about that for a second. Fifteen weeks. That’s almost four straight months. Titanic hit theaters in December of 1997, coming in first place at the box office its opening weekend. It then just sat there at the top of the charts until April of the following year. Every week brought a new crop of movies, hopefully released into hundreds or more theaters across the country. And every week, Americans made the joint decision to just see Titanic again instead.

There was precedence for this kind of magic run. It happened more often in the ’80s, when huge smashes like Beverly Hills Cop and Tootsie became similarly inescapable, each winning more than a dozen weekends straight. (It’s no coincidence that those films, like Cameron’s, opened in December; given Hollywood’s historic tendency to treat the early weeks of the year like a dumping ground for undesirable projects, it makes sense that a highly beloved movie could bulldoze from Christmas straight through the spring.) Titanic was really the last of this kind of hot-streak hit. No movie since has monopolized American movie culture in quite the same way.

---