The Billion-Dollar Blockbuster Leaving Netflix For Good
Although the heart goes on, Titanic’s voyage on Netflix is coming to an end. After just three months on the streamer, the sensational James Cameron-directed romantic drama will sail off into the sunset, with its final day on the platform on September 30. After just three months, subscribers haven’t had an extraordinarily long time to catch the film so you’ll want to act now if you want to catch the romantic story whether it be for the first or 100th time.
James Cameron’s epic Oscar magnet Titanic is leaving Netflix after September 30.
Bolstering the careers of its young stars, Titanic was a pivotal project for its leads, Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. After gaining critical acclaim in films like What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, This Boy’s Life, The Basketball Diaries, Marvin’s Room, and Romeo + Juliet, Titanic would be the next milestone in DiCaprio’s already successful career.
Likewise, the film’s leading lady, Kate Winslet, had also begun to make a name for herself in the entertainment industry, having starred opposite fellow up-and-comer Melanie Lynskey in Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures as well as alongside Emma Thompson in Sense and Sensibility.
Rounding out the cast, with each delivering a dynamite performance, Titanic also included performances by Bill Paxton (Twister), Billy Zane (Back to the Future), Kathy Bates (Misery), Frances Fisher (The Lincoln Lawyer), Danny Nucci (The Rock), David Warner (The Omen), Victor Garber (Legally Blonde), Bernard Hill (The Lord of the Rings trilogy), and Jonathan Hyde (Jumanji).
Weaving history with fiction, James Cameron’s legendary film followed the passengers and crew aboard the Titanic as the doomed ship set out for America from Southampton, England. The main plot followed a love story between DiCaprio’s Jack Dawson – a lower-class man – and Winslet’s Rose DeWitt Bukater – a young woman torn between her life of privilege and her freedom. Although Rose is engaged to Zane’s Cal, she strikes up a relationship with Jack, who is everything that Rose’s fiance isn’t.
Having his own obsession with the ill-fated ocean liner’s journey, Cameron has been down to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean on several occasions to get his own look at the wreckage. In fact, he and a team were down there on September 11, 2001, only finding out about the terrorist attacks when they made it back up to the surface.
While Titanic’s story of young love is entirely fictional, there were many characters incorporated who were based on real-life people aboard the ship. Kathy Bates’ Molly Brown was a famous human rights activist while Victor Garber plays the boat’s builder, Thomas Andrews, Bernard Hill appears as Captain Edward John Smith and Jonathan Hyde is featured as J. Bruce Ismay, one of the pompous heads of the White Star Line. Caught between the lines of fact and fiction is not only a piece of entertainment but also a warning about nature and its elements, as well as the cockiness of humanity.
To say that Titanic was a box office hit would be doing the title a major disservice. With a production cost of $200 million, James Cameron’s flick raked in well over $2 billion at the global box office. On the list of highest-grossing films, the legendary director holds the fourth, third, and fifth positions. As of this article, Titanic is in fourth place, with Avatar: The Way of Water in third, Avengers: Endgame in second, and Avatar in first.
Known for making some of the biggest blockbusters of our time, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that James Cameron took his duties as the director of Titanic very seriously. Having his own obsession with the ill-fated ocean liner’s journey, Cameron has been down to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean on several occasions to get his own look at the wreckage. In fact, he and a team were down there on September 11, 2001, only finding out about the terrorist attacks when they made it back up to the surface.
His dedication to bringing Titanic to life saw James Cameron push beyond the boundaries of what was expected in filmmaking. Not only did he use larger-than-life sets to capture the grandiosity of the legendary boat, but he also shot scene after scene in frigid water – something that would later come back to bite him as many members of the cast and crew suffered by way of kidney infection, flu, and colds.
With a production cost of $200 million, James Cameron’s flick raked in well over $2 billion at the global box office.
Of those included was Kate Winslet, who vowed never to team up with Cameron again unless the price was right – she recently appeared in his film, Avatar: The Way of Water.
Titanic’s arrival on Netflix was a hotly debated one as it came very shortly following the news of the OceanGate submersible known as Titan, which, while on an expedition to the ship’s wreckage, suffered an implosion, killing everyone on board. Now, just a few months later, Netflix is bidding adieu to the billion-dollar production, with viewers only having a handful of days left before it sails away.
