Titanic tells a fictional love story that is set aboard the famous ship during its ill-fated maiden voyage in April of 1912. The main story focuses on Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet), a young woman who boards the RMS Titanic with her fiancé Cal Hockley (Billy Zane), son of a Pittsburgh steel tycoon and heir to a vast fortune. The couple is returning to America where they’re going to be married, much to the approval of Rose's traditional mother Ruth (Frances Fisher). Despite Cal's promise of great wealth and an easy life for the DeWitt Bukater’s, Rose is displeased with her life and the prospect of a long, tedious, and controlled marriage to a man she does not truly love. When she attempts to kill herself by falling from the rear of the ship into the freezing Atlantic Ocean, she is stopped by a kind young man from steerage named Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio), an artistically inclined nomad who won his tickets in a game of poker a few minutes prior to Titanic's departure. The two form an instant connection and recognize a spark between themselves. Jack is ‘rewarded’ for saving Rose's life with an invitation to a first-class dinner. Rose grows to admire Jack's sense of freedom, his charm, carefree attitude, and self-worth despite meager origins and a largely aimless life. Cal despises him for his background, poor upbringing, and financial instability. Slowly but surely, Rose and Jack's emotions draw closer together, igniting a whirlwind love affair born of the heart yet also born on the eve of one of the great disasters in human history.

The idea for this came from writer/director James Cameron’s fascinations with shipwrecks. When he saw an IMAX film made from footage of the Titanic’s remains, a lightbulb went off in his head to make his own movie as a way to dive into the shipwreck. Cameron pitched the project to 20th Century Fox as a three-hour epic which would tell the story of ‘Romeo & Juliet on the Titanic’. While the studio had their doubts about the film’s commercial appeal, they still gave it a greenlit with hopes of a long-term working relationship with him. Fox ended up co-financing the movie along with Paramount Pictures with a release date originally set for July 2nd, 1997. However, so many problems ended up happening during production with much of the cast getting colds, flu, and/or kidney infections from spending too much time in cold water, principal photography going from 138 days of filming up to 160, and the final budget coming all the way up to $200,000,000 (which at the time, made it the most expensive movie ever made). Not to mention that in the middle of post-production, studio executives suggested to James Cameron about cutting some footage down from the three-hour runtime, but he strongly refused. From all that bad publicity, literally everyone on the face of the Earth was convinced that Titanic was going to become the biggest flop in history.

Yet when the film was finally released on December 19th, 1997, it way surpassed everyone’s expectations by becoming a cultural sensation. Titanic’s continuous success at the box office led to it breaking all different kinds of records. It not only dethroned 1993’s Jurassic Park as the highest-grossing film of all time (until James Cameron’s follow-up, Avatar, broke the record 12 years later), but it also became the very first movie to have ever made over $1,000,000,000 worldwide. Not to mention that both of the leads, Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio, became global superstars as a result. On March 23rd, 1998, Titanic won 11 Academy Awards (an all-time record it currently shares with Ben-Hur and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King) for Best Picture, Best Director (James Cameron), Best Art Direction, Best Costume Design, Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, Best Sound Effects Editing, Best Sound, Best Original Score, Best Original Song (‘My Heart Will Go On’), and Best Visual Effects. It is also the most recent movie to have won the Oscar for Best Picture without a screenplay nomination.