Kate Winslet Movie That Made Jacob Elordi Cry Outshines Titanic in the Ratings

Here is a fun twist on cinematic crying: the Kate Winslet movie that broke Jacob Elordi wasn't Titanic. It was Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibility. And if you care about the numbers critics live by, that checks out.

Elordi, Winslet, and the movie that actually got him

In a W Magazine chat, Elordi — who tends to play guys that make your skin crawl — admitted he lost it during Sense and Sensibility. Not in a meme-y way. In the human way.

"I watched Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibility, and there's a moment when Kate Winslet's character has an emotional realization. I was sitting there, eating ice cream, and then I just broke down with her character. I cried through that movie, just at the hopeless beauty of us all."

Coming from the same actor who just stunned in Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein, picked up his first Critics' Choice Award, and snagged a Golden Globe nomination, that confession hits different: he's responding to restraint, not spectacle.

The numbers back it up

• Sense and Sensibility (1995) — Director: Ang Lee; Genre: period drama/romance; Rotten Tomatoes: 97%; Metacritic: 84/100; CinemaScore: A; Legacy: widely considered among the best Jane Austen adaptations
• Titanic (1997) — Director: James Cameron; Genre: epic historical romance; Rotten Tomatoes: 88%; Metacritic: 75/100; CinemaScore: A+; Legacy: one of the highest-grossing films in history

So yes, Titanic is the box office behemoth. But Sense and Sensibility quietly outruns it with critics — a two-years-earlier Winslet performance built on precision and patience.

Why Sense and Sensibility still lands

The 1995 film tracks sisters Elinor and Marianne Dashwood after their father's death leaves them navigating reduced finances, social rules with teeth, and the sort of romantic setbacks that come with both. Emma Thompson's Elinor is all composure and damage control. Kate Winslet's Marianne lives fully in the open — impulsive, sincere, and sometimes reckless.

The cast is stacked without ever feeling showy: Thompson, Hugh Grant, Winslet, and Alan Rickman pitch their performances just shy of melodrama. Winslet's Marianne is the key — she makes heartbreak feel sharp and unvarnished, not a plea for pity. That honesty is why the movie keeps landing with new audiences.

Behind the camera, this wasn't a quick-turn gig. Thompson spent five years adapting Austen, trimming without sanding off the wit. Ang Lee — not an Austen guy going in — approached it as a story about social repression and personal will. The result works for the purists and for anyone who just wants to feel something real. The film earned seven Oscar nominations, won Best Adapted Screenplay, and kicked off a fresh wave of Austen fever around the world.

And the reason it endures is simple: it trusts the audience's emotional intelligence. It lets silence do work. It gives its women interior lives. That's the kind of craft that sneaks up on you — or, if you're Jacob Elordi, knocks you flat in front of your ice cream.

Elordi's Frankenstein win and where this is heading

Elordi's career isn't drifting; it's accelerating. At the 2026 Critics' Choice Awards in Santa Monica, the 28-year-old won Best Supporting Actor for playing the Creature in del Toro's Frankenstein. He was genuinely blindsided onstage — grateful, a little stunned — and singled out del Toro with real affection, saying the filmmaker shaped his childhood imagination when he was 11.

Onscreen, Elordi disappears under heavy prosthetics and movement work influenced by butoh — he's described it as learning to reanimate a body. His Creature starts as Victor Frankenstein's prized project (Victor is played by Oscar Isaac) and is then discarded when he doesn't meet the creator's lofty intellectual standards. After enough human cruelty, the character's curiosity turns corrosive. Elordi has said he poured his entire life into the role and that the version of himself you're seeing there is, in some ways, the truest one.

Industry-wise, that reads loud and clear. In a field with Benicio del Toro, Paul Mescal, Sean Penn, Adam Sandler, and Stellan Skarsgård, he stood out for making vulnerability feel dangerous. With a Golden Globe nomination already locked and Oscar chatter picking up, he's trending toward staying power, not novelty.

One last thought (and where to watch)

Maybe we are finally rewarding feeling over noise again. Or maybe it's a brief moment of sanity before the next shiny thing. Either way: if you want to see what cracked Elordi open, Titanic is streaming on Netflix, and Sense and Sensibility is available to rent on Apple TV. Tell me which one gets you.