20 Must-See Billion Dollar Movies

Box Office Gross: $2,194,439,542 (#3 of All Time)

The first billion-dollar movie and still one of the very best, Titanic is a true Hollywood masterpiece.

Titanic works on many, many levels. It's a visually magnificent film-making tour-de-force, it's a devastating tragic love story, it's a wonderful tribute to classic Hollywood cinema and, most importantly of all, it's a great and respectful tribute to the lives lost in one of history's worst man-made disasters.

It has been divisive in the years since (well, when something is this popular some backlash is pretty much inevitable), which is a real shame. Yes, the dialogue is flawed and the depictions of class are incredibly unsubtle, but this is just part of the film's style. The film is intended as a call-back to classical Hollywood, in which this kind of unsubtle, melodramatic storytelling was plentiful.

This unfair backlash is very unfortunate, but Titanic remains one of cinema's best blockbusters nonetheless. It's also proof that James Cameron is one of the finest Hollywood directors of them all, although it also makes one even more depressed that he's wasted the last twenty years working on Avatar and its sequels.