Before "Titanic" became one of the most successful films in history, the project was fighting to stay afloat.
The film's late producer, Jon Landau, in his forthcoming memoir "The Bigger Picture," detailed the behind-the-scenes fight over the film's first trailer. Ultimately, the dispute helped shift the public's perception of James Cameron's 1997 blockbuster, but at the time the film faced deep skepticism.
"For any movie, the first trailer is hugely important. It's the best chance you will have to capture an audience," Landau wrote in an excerpt published by Variety on Tuesday.
"You have two and a half minutes to convey the movie's story and feel," he wrote. "Those 150 seconds are everything, and like so many things on 'Titanic,' they became the subject of a major battle."
The marketing team struggled to condense the three-hour-and-fourteen-minute film into a short promotional clip.
Landau said the initial version ran just over four minutes, far longer than the industry standard.
When it was shown to Paramount executives, the studio's head of distribution and marketing reacted harshly, telling Landau, "I saw your trailer and I'm throwing up all over my shoes."
Paramount created its own competing version, a faster, louder cut that emphasized explosions and action sequences.
"We called it the John Woo trailer," Landau wrote.
"It was all flash cuts and pounding music, gunshots, and screams. It made the movie look like an action flick that happened to take place on the 'Titanic.' It was not our movie."
After days of tense discussions with the studio, Landau and Cameron persuaded Paramount to test the longer trailer at ShoWest, the annual gathering of theater owners in Las Vegas.
The screening came at a pivotal moment: the film's $200 million budget, then the most expensive ever, had fueled doubts about whether it could succeed.
"It was the first footage almost anyone outside the studio and production team had seen of 'Titanic,' " Landau wrote.
"Everyone was tense. We'd spent five years and $200 million. At times, it seemed like the whole world was rooting for us to fail."
The audience reaction changed everything.
Landau recalled that actor Kurt Russell broke the silence after the trailer ended, saying, "I'd pay ten dollars just to see that trailer again."
The moment led the Motion Picture Association to grant an exception to its trailer length limits, allowing the studio to release the four-minute version worldwide.
"From that day on, every negative article about the film ended with the sentiment that the movie might actually be good," Landau wrote. "It was a real turning point."
When "Titanic" opened in December 1997, it debuted at No. 1 with $28.6 million and remained atop the box office for 15 consecutive weeks, eventually becoming the highest-grossing film of all time.
It went on to earn 11 Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, and launched Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet to global fame.
Reflecting years later, Cameron told Entertainment Weekly that the film's success felt surreal.
"It was like being in a kind of dream state," he said in 2018. "I kept expecting somebody to wake us up and say, 'No, that didn't really happen. You just dreamed that.' "
Zoe Papadakis ✉
Zoe Papadakis is a Newsmax writer based in South Africa with two decades of experience specializing in media and entertainment. She has been in the news industry as a reporter, writer and editor for newspapers, magazine and websites.
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