Box office Including revenue from the 2012, 2017 and 2023 reissues,
Titanic earned $674.3 million in North America and $1.590 billion in other countries, for a worldwide total of $2.264 billion. It became the
highest-grossing film of all time worldwide in 1998, beating
Jurassic Park (1993). A
Hindustan Times report attributes this to its similarities and shared themes with most
Bollywood films.
Initial theatrical run Titanic received steady attendance after opening in North America on Friday, December 19, 1997. By the end of the weekend, theaters were beginning to sell out. The film earned $8,658,814 on its opening day and $28,638,131 over the opening weekend from 2,674 theaters, averaging to about $10,710 per venue, and ranking number one at the box office, ahead of
Mouse Hunt,
Scream 2 and
Tomorrow Never Dies. It would go on to break
The Godfather Part IIIs record for having the highest Christmas Day gross, generating a total of $9.2 million. For its second weekend, the film made $35.6 million, making it the biggest December weekend gross, replacing
Scream 2. By New Year's Day,
Titanic had made over $120 million, had increased in popularity and theaters continued to sell out. In just 44 days, it became the fastest film to approach the $300 million mark at the domestic box office, surpassing the former record held by
Jurassic Park, which took 67 days to do so.
Titanic would hold this record until 1999 when it was taken by
Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace. Additionally, the film reached the $400 million mark within 66 days, which was the fastest at the time, a record matched by
Spider-Man in 2002. Both films were surpassed in 2004 by
Shrek 2.
Titanics highest-grossing day was Saturday, February 14, 1998, on which it earned $13,048,711, more than eight weeks after its North American debut. On March 14, it surpassed
Star Wars as the highest-grossing film ever in North America. It stayed at number one for 15 consecutive weeks in North America, a record for any film. By April 1998, the film's number one spot was overtaken by
Lost in Space. It stayed in theaters in North America for almost 10 months before finally closing on Thursday, October 1, 1998, with a final domestic gross of $600,788,188, equivalent to $ million in . Outside North America, the film made double its North American gross, generating $1,242,413,080 and accumulating a grand total of $1,843,201,268 worldwide from its initial theatrical run.
Commercial analysis Various film critics predicted
Titanic would be a
major commercial failure, especially since it was the most expensive film ever made at the time. When it was shown to the press in late 1997, "it was with massive forebodings", since the "people in charge of the screenings believed they were on the verge of losing their jobs – because of this great
albatross of a picture on which, finally, two studios had to combine to share the great load of its making". and after 14 weeks was still bringing in more than $1 million on weekdays. Although young women who saw the film several times and subsequently caused "
Leo-Mania" were often credited for taking it to its all-time box office record, other reports have attributed the success to positive
word of mouth and repeat viewership due to the love story combined with the ground-breaking special effects.
The Hollywood Reporter estimated that after a combined production and promotion cost of $487 million,
Titanic turned a net profit of $1.4 billion, with a modern profit of as much as $4 billion after ancillary sources.
Titanics impact on men has also been especially credited. It is considered one of the films that make men cry, Scott Meslow of
The Atlantic stated while
Titanic initially seems to need no defense, given its success, it is considered a film "for 15-year-old girls" by its main detractors. He argued that dismissing
Titanic as fodder for teenage girls fails to consider the film's accomplishment: "that [this] grandiose, 3+ hour historical romantic drama is a film for everyone—including teenage boys." Meslow stated that though the film is ranked high by males under the age of 18, matching the ratings for teenage boy-targeted films like
Iron Man, it is common for boys and men to deny liking
Titanic. He acknowledged his own rejection of the film as a child while secretly loving it. "It's this collection of elements—the history, the romance, the action—that made (and continues to make)
Titanic an irresistible proposition for audiences of all ages across the globe," he stated. "
Titanic has flaws, but for all its legacy, it's better than its middlebrow reputation would have you believe. It's a great movie for 15-year-old girls, but that doesn't mean it's not a great movie for everyone else too." According to Richard Harris, a psychology professor at
Kansas State University, who studied why people like to cite films in social situations, using film quotations in everyday conversation is similar to telling a joke and a way to form solidarity with others. "People are doing it to feel good about themselves, to make others laugh, to make themselves laugh", he said.
Media Awareness Network stated, "The normal repeat viewing rate for a blockbuster theatrical film is about 5%. The repeat rate for
Titanic was over 20%." Cameron's follow-up film,
Avatar, was considered the first film with a genuine chance at surpassing its worldwide gross, and did so in 2010. Brandon Gray, president of
Box Office Mojo, said that while
Avatar may beat
Titanic revenue record, the film is unlikely to surpass
Titanic in attendance. "Ticket prices were about $3 cheaper in the late 1990s."
Critical response Initial Titanic garnered mostly positive reviews from film critics, and was positively reviewed by audiences and scholars, who commented on its cultural, historical, and political impacts. On the
review aggregator website
Rotten Tomatoes, it has an approval rating of 88% based on 255 reviews, with an average rating of 8.1/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "A mostly unqualified triumph for James Cameron, who offers a dizzying blend of spectacular visuals and old-fashioned
melodrama." Audiences polled by
CinemaScore gave it a rare "A+" grade, one of fewer than 60 films in the history of the service from 1982 to 2011 to earn the score. With regard to the overall design,
Roger Ebert stated: "It is flawlessly crafted, intelligently constructed, strongly acted, and spellbinding... Movies like this are not merely difficult to make at all, but almost impossible to make well." He credited the "technical difficulties" with being "so daunting that it's a wonder when the filmmakers are also able to bring the drama and history into proportion" and "found [himself] convinced by both the story and the sad saga". He named it his ninth-best film of 1997. The television program
Siskel & Ebert gave
Titanic "two thumbs up" and praised its accuracy in recreating the ship's sinking; Ebert described it as "a glorious Hollywood epic" and "well worth the wait," and
Gene Siskel found Leonardo DiCaprio "captivating".
James Berardinelli stated: "Meticulous in detail, yet vast in scope and intent,
Titanic is the kind of epic motion picture event that has become a rarity. You don't just watch
Titanic, you experience it." It was named his second best film of 1997. Joseph McBride of
Boxoffice Magazine concluded: "To describe
Titanic as the greatest disaster movie ever made is to sell it short. James Cameron's recreation of the 1912 sinking of the 'unsinkable' liner is one of the most magnificent pieces of serious popular entertainment ever to emanate from Hollywood."
Owen Gleiberman of
Entertainment Weekly described the film as "a lush and terrifying spectacle of romantic doom. Writer-director James Cameron has restaged the defining catastrophe of the early 20th century on a human scale of such purified yearning and dread that he touches the deepest levels of popular moviemaking."
Janet Maslin of
The New York Times commented that "Cameron's magnificent
Titanic is the first spectacle in decades that honestly invites comparison to
Gone With the Wind."
Titanic suffered backlash in addition to its success. Some reviewers felt that while the visuals were spectacular, the story and dialogue were weak.
Kenneth Turan's review in the
Los Angeles Times was particularly scathing. Dismissing the emotive elements, he stated, "What really brings on the tears is Cameron's insistence that writing this kind of movie is within his abilities. Not only is it not, it is not even close." He later argued that the only reason that the film won Oscars was because of its box office total. Barbara Shulgasser of
The San Francisco Examiner gave
Titanic one star out of four, citing a friend as saying, "The number of times in this unbelievably badly written script that the two [lead characters] refer to each other by name was an indication of just how dramatically the script lacked anything more interesting for the actors to say."
Retrospective According to Dalin Rowell of
/Film, "With complaints about its lengthy runtime, observations that certain characters could have easily fit onto pieces of floating furniture, and jokes about its melodramatic nature,
Titanic is no stranger to modern-day criticism." In 2002, filmmaker
Robert Altman called it "the most dreadful piece of work I've ever seen in my entire life". Similarly,
French New Wave director and former
Cahiers du Cinéma editor
Jacques Rivette referred to it as "garbage" in a 1998 interview with
Frédéric Bonnaud and was particularly critical of Winslet's performance, who he said was "unwatchable, the most slovenly girl to appear on the screen in a long, long time." In 2003,
Titanic topped a poll of "Best Film Endings", but it also topped a poll by
Film 2003 as "the worst movie of all time". In his 2012 study of the lives of the passengers on the
Titanic, historian
Richard Davenport-Hines said, "Cameron's film diabolized rich Americans and educated English, anathematizing their emotional restraint, good tailoring, punctilious manners and grammatical training, while it made
romantic heroes of the poor Irish and the unlettered." The British film magazine
Empire reduced their rating from the maximum five stars and an enthusiastic review, to four stars with a less positive review in a later edition, to accommodate its readers' tastes, who wanted to disassociate themselves from the hype, and the reported activities of its fans, such as those attending multiple screenings. In addition to this, positive and negative parodies and other such spoofs abounded and circulated on the internet, often inspiring passionate responses from fans of various opinions. Benjamin Willcock of DVDActive.com did not understand the backlash or the passionate hatred. "What really irks me...," he said, "are those who make nasty stabs at those who do love it." Willcock stated, "I obviously don't have anything against those who dislike
Titanic, but those few who make you feel small and pathetic for doing so (and they do exist, trust me) are way beyond my understanding and sympathy." In 2000, Almar Haflidason of the
BBC wrote that "the critical knives were out long before James Cameron's
Titanic was complete. Spiralling costs that led to it becoming the most expensive motion picture of the 20th Century, and a cast without any big stars seemed to doom the film before release. But box office and audience appreciation proved Cameron right and many critics wrong." He added that "the sinking of the great ship is no secret, yet for many exceeded expectations in sheer scale and tragedy" and that "when you consider that [the film] tops a bum-numbing three-hour running time, then you have a truly impressive feat of entertainment achieved by Cameron".
Empire eventually reinstated its original five-star rating, writing: "It should be no surprise then that it became fashionable to bash James Cameron's
Titanic at approximately the same time it became clear that this was the planet's favourite film. Ever." In 2017, on the 20th anniversary of its release,
Titanic was selected for preservation in the United States
National Film Registry by the
Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". The same year, Cameron reviewed the accuracy of the film for the
National Geographic program
Titanic: 20 Years Later with James Cameron. The climax has sparked many debates about whether both Jack and Rose should have been able to fit on the floating door and survive, becoming among the most talked about aspects of the film. At the film's 20th anniversary, Cameron stated that it was "kind of silly, really, that we're having this discussion 20 years later". In 2023 he conducted a study for the film's 25th anniversary that aired as part of an updated National Geographic retrospective, which suggested it was possible but unlikely and depended on numerous variables, after a previous test had been conducted in 2012 by
MythBusters. Titanic was listed among the 100 best films in an
Empire poll and in a later poll of members of the film industry. In 2021, Dalin Rowell of
/Film ranked it the third-best film of Cameron's career, stating that it is "easily one of his best films, simply because it defied the odds", and considering it "a legitimately remarkable achievement — one that, despite its large budget, has a humble, earnest center. Even with all of the jokes the Internet loves to throw its way,
Titanic demonstrates that Cameron is truly capable of everything he can imagine." In 2025,
The Hollywood Reporter listed
Titanic as having the best stunts of 1997. ==Accolades==