&34;Everyone was tense,&34; recalled Oscarwinning producer Jon Landau. &34;We'd spent five years and $200 million. At times, it seemed like the whole world was

"Everyone was tense," recalled Oscar-winning producer Jon Landau. "We'd spent five years and $200 million. At times, it seemed like the whole world was rooting for us to fail."

Titanic was set to be massive flop until it was saved from sinking by a surprising gamble

"Everyone was tense," recalled Oscar-winning producer Jon Landau. "We'd spent five years and $200 million. At times, it seemed like the whole world was rooting for us to fail."

By Shania Russell

Shania Russell

Shania Russell is a news writer at *, *with five years of experience. Her work has previously appeared in SlashFilm and Paste Magazine.

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October 14, 2025 6:11 p.m. ET

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Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio in 'Titanic' (1997). Credit:

Believe it or not, *Titanic*'s success was an uphill battle.

Before James Cameron's Oscar-winning disaster film shattered box office records, became a worldwide phenomenon, and turned Leonardo DiCaprio into a household name, *Titanic* was the talk of Hollywood for all the wrong reasons. Plagued by delays and rumors of a troubled set, the film was expected to flop. In his posthumous memoir, *The Bigger Picture*, Oscar-winning producer Jon Landau recounts the moment that all changed.

"For any movie, the first trailer is hugely important. It's the best chance you will have to capture an audience," Landau wrote in an excerpt published Tuesday by Variety. "You have two and a half minutes to convey the movie's story and feel. Those 150 seconds are everything, and like so many things on *Titanic*, they became the subject of a major battle."

Landau wrote that it was no simple task, reducing the 3-hour-and-14-minute movie into a then-standard 90-second trailer. The team ended up producing a cut that was just over four minutes and when they sent it out, Landau said the head of distribution and marketing at Paramount responded, "I saw your trailer and I'm throwing up all over my shoes."

Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio in 'Titanic'.

But their cut had a competitor: Paramount had used the same footage to cut a shorter trailer.

"We called it the John Woo trailer," Landau wrote, referencing the renowned Hong Kong action director. "It was all flash cuts and pounding music, gunshots, and screams. It made the movie look like an action flick that happened to take place on the *Titanic*. It was not our movie."

The dueling trailers sparked a back-and-forth with Paramount: "First reasoning, then screaming," Landau wrote of the conversations. They ultimately convinced the studio to test the longer trailer at ShoWest, the conference of the National Association of Theatre Owners in Las Vegas, to get a sense of how it would land.

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"These are the people who really matter. By choosing what movies to book into their theaters and deciding how many screens to dedicate to them, they serve as arbiters, a link to distribution," Landau explained.

By this point, rumors were swirling about *Titanic*'s ability to succeed. The film was being produced for an unprecedented $200 million budget — the most expensive movie ever made at the time — and the general public wasn't yet convinced that a movie about an 85-year-old maritime tragedy was anything to get hyped about. Needless to say, the test screening of the trailer was high stakes.

"It was the first footage almost anyone outside the studio and production team had seen of *Titanic*," Landau wrote. "Everyone was tense. We'd spent five years and $200 million. At times, it seemed like the whole world was rooting for us to fail. Time magazine ran a *Titanic* cover story with the cover line 'Glub, Glub, Glub . . .' The sound of the big ship sinking."

Landau said he sat "nervously" as the room full of executives and big names watched the trailer. But he was thankfully rewarded when Kurt Russell, who was set to star in the studio's upcoming film *Breakdown*, was the first to speak up.

"Just as it ended, Kurt Russell loudly announced, 'I'd pay ten dollars just to see that trailer again,'" Landau recalled. "With that, we got a special dispensation from the Motion Picture Association — trailers were supposed to be 150 seconds, max — to release a four-minute-and-two-second trailer to audiences around the world. And from that day on, every negative article about the film ended with the sentiment that the movie might actually be good. It was a real turning point."

Producer Jon Landau & director James Cameron with the Oscar for Best Picture for 'Titanic'.

Frank Trapper/Corbis via Getty

Russell was definitely onto something. When *Titanic* hit theaters, the audience showed up: the film debuted at No. 1 to a respectable if muted $28.6 million. And then the audience returned — again and again and again. The disaster film stayed at the top for a whopping 15 weeks, eventually earning the title of the highest-grossing film of all time. It held that honor for more than a decade before being dethroned by Cameron's own *Avatar*.

***Get your daily dose of entertainment news, celebrity updates, and what to watch with our EW Dispatch newsletter.***

*Titanic* enjoyed several more markers of success: It catapulted DiCaprio and Kate Winslet into international stardom and earned 14 nominations at the 1998 Academy Awards (it is tied with *All About Eve* and *La La Land* for most Oscar nods, and has not been surpassed). The film ultimately took home 11 statuettes, cleaning up in the technical categories and scoring Best Picture and Best Director.

As for the frenzy of love, Cameron previously told ** that after weeks of speculation that the film would not only fail, but torpedo his career, he could hardly process the overwhelming praise.

"It was like being in a kind of dream state," he said in 2018. "I kept expecting somebody to wake us up and say, 'No, that didn't really happen. You just dreamed that.'"**

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