In promotion for the upcoming release of Titanic on Blu-ray, ‘Titanic’ director James Cameron and producer Jon Landau are giving interviews about the release of the movie and how it became a pop cultural phenomenon. In a question and answer session, one of the things Cameron talks about it how Titanic’s box office continued growing as word-of-mouth spread.
He says, “The thing that most people don’t remember now is that when the film opened, it opened to a 28 million dollar weekend, which is not spectacular, and is definitely bad now. It just so happened that the second weekend open to $29 million, and that had only happened once before with E.T. The weekend after that was $32 million and after that, we were in completely unknown territory. Unfortunately the studio had already sold off the studio rights before the film became a huge success, so they got one third of what they could have gotten if they waited a little longer. And here’s a little tidbit- the highest grossing day of the release was day 60, which is usually when movies are completely gone out of the market place and already on DVD, and that day was Valentine’s Day.”
After that, Titanic went on to become the highest grossing movie of its time, grossing over $1.8 billion worldwide originally, and then crossing $2 billion with the re-release.
