Can someone explain how this movie became such a hit?

[Darth Macho]

Short answer: Girls.

Okay, a little more: Girls saw it alone, then saw it again with friends, then dragged their dates to see it.

Long answer: Some movies don't need exceptional quality to make money because their cultural mass exerts a gravitational field. Everyone had to see Titanic just to keep themselves current with popular society. And there's a large segment of the population that is simply incapable of saving their money; they demand that every week there's something in the theaters for them to buy a ticket, regardless of craft. Factor in the single-issue viewers (1997: 'Man, Titanic sucks.' "Don't care; Leonardo DiCaprio is hot." 2009: 'Man, Transformers 2 sucks.' "Don't care; Megan Fox is hot.") and you've got an incentive for Hollywood to be lazy.

But mostly it's the girls.

[Russell]

I didn't know Carrot Top was in Titanic.

Doot-doot-doodle-oodle oot doot do do...

Thank you.
Now give me some tie straightening music please.

Carrot Top?! I thought that was Bram Stoker's Dracula!

[Doctor Who?]

Zane's character is easily the worst thing about the film.  What is he really loved Rose and wasn't evil incarnate?  If he had any nuance at all, it might have made an interesting choice for the audience:

Was Rose a repressed girl finally breaking free?  Or was she a cheating skank who bones a prepubescent little kid because she's bored?

Zane being Beelzebub in this movie made everything way too simplistic.

 

Well said.

[DarthKosh]

Some of the reasons are

1. it was the begining of the dot com boom
2. megaplexes were starting to get built
3. it came out in the winter so no compitition.

[Scrivener]

I always thought the explanation was fairly simple.  It played to the two main demographics:  a sweeping love story for the women, and eye-popping special effects for the men.

Michael Bay tried to ape this a few years later, when he crowbarred a love triangle into Pearl Harbor.  The war story might have worked okay with the guys, but nobody seemed to buy the romantic plot, and it made only a third of what Titanic grossed domestically.

Since then, Bay has abandoned all subtlety on both fronts, giving us both pouty, sluttulous Megan Fox and blurry, hyperkinetic robot battles.  This combination seems to be working much better for him at the box office.

[TTYT]

Five pages and no one has the answer?

C'mon, people, it's easy why this was a hit: That goddamn Celine Dion song.

[Darth Geek]

Five pages and no one has the answer?

C'mon, people, it's easy why this was a hit: That goddamn Celine Dion song.

Wel of course. I mean t has Near, Far, AND Wherever You Are! That's range, people!

[ShadowDog]

The mention of it coming out in winter reminded me of all the post production problems this movie had.  It was supposed to be a summer movie, and I think ended up having it's release date changed at least twice.  At the time it was the most expensive movie ever made ... by about $50 million.  The only way Cameron was able to save his job at one point was to give back all the back end points the studio promised him (when the movie became such a hit the studio sheepishly returned his back end deal)  This movie could have been the biggest disaster (no pun intended) the filmmaking world had ever seen if it had bombed.

This movie has many, MANY flaws, but as a filmmaking myself I can't help but admire how ugly this could have gotten and then it ended up going completely to the other side of the spectrum.  It would be like your boss walking in on you whacking off in your office ... but before he can fire you the FBI bursts in and arrests him for embezzlement.  There is no way you should have gotten out of this!

[Doctor Who?]

The mention of it coming out in winter reminded me of all the post production problems this movie had.  It was supposed to be a summer movie, and I think ended up having it's release date changed at least twice.  At the time it was the most expensive movie ever made ... by about $50 million.  The only way Cameron was able to save his job at one point was to give back all the back end points the studio promised him (when the movie became such a hit the studio sheepishly returned his back end deal)  This movie could have been the biggest disaster (no pun intended) the filmmaking world had ever seen if it had bombed.

This movie has many, MANY flaws, but as a filmmaking myself I can't help but admire how ugly this could have gotten and then it ended up going completely to the other side of the spectrum.  It would be like your boss walking in on you whacking off in your office ... but before he can fire you the FBI bursts in and arrests him for embezzlement.  There is no way you should have gotten out of this!

Wow that is great!  I love it!

[mrbasehart]

James Cameron seems to be able to tread that line.  There were concerns about the budget for Terminator 2 and Avatar, and yet those turned out perfectly fine as well.