People didn't just expect Titanic to fail; they wanted it to as well. Long before the film hit critics and audiences had their jokes about James Cameron's three-hour epic ready and waiting. This was a director who had made his name in sci-fi, constructing a period romance that had become the most expensive film ever made (for the time) that we all already knew the end to. With blanket coverage of the moviemaking process just coming into prominence with the Internet, Titanic's journey was scrutinised no end. Stretched shooting schedules, delays in post-production and two studios pooling their funding just to get the thing finished had this pegged as a disaster to rival Waterworld or Cleopatra (a film notorious for haemorrhaging money). With retrospect it all feels rather silly, not only given how the film ended up being received, but because of the level of earnest with which Cameron approached the project. Born from his obsession with the infamous sinking, there's an attention to historical detail in the film that, despite the totally fictional A-story, makes this as factually accurate an account of the sinking as the much-touted A Night To Remember. As the December 1997 release approached positive word from test screenings seeped through, but many of the film's critics remained sceptical, particularly of its financial prospects. The simple fact was that for Titanic to make back its budget it would need to be an unprecedented success, maybe even the biggest movie of all time. It was. Did any other movies surprise you when they didn't sink like a stone? Which upcoming movies do you expect to bomb spectacularly? Discuss everything to do with cinematic flops down in the comments section below.
