Titanic Producer Reveals How a $2.2 Billion Phenomenon Nearly Sank at the Box Office
It raked in $2.2 billion, but Titanic almost sank at the box office. A posthumous memoir from the film’s producer reveals how delays, dire rumors, and a few high-stakes calls turned a presumed flop into a record-shattering phenomenon.
Hard to believe now, but Titanic was once the movie everyone expected to sink. In his posthumous memoir, producer Jon Landau walks through the moment a single trailer flipped the narrative from impending disaster to one of the biggest box office runs ever.
The flop that wasn't (but almost was)
Landau, the late producer behind Titanic and Alita: Battle Angel, says the panic was real. After years of delays and all those rumors about a chaotic shoot, studios and the press were circling. Time magazine even ran a cover story predicting a bomb. Meanwhile, Cameron and Landau had spent five years on the film and about $200 million. Stakes, meet throat.
The trailer war
Landau writes that those couple minutes of marketing can make or break a movie. The idea is simple: you get just enough time to sell the story and the feeling. Doing that for a 3-hour-14-minute epic? Not simple.
The Titanic team cut a four-minute-and-two-second trailer and sent it to both studios backing the film, Paramount and 20th Century Fox. The initial response from Paramount's marketing boss Rob Friedman was, well, vivid:
"I saw your trailer, and I'm throwing up all over my shoes."
Paramount answered with their own much shorter cut, nicknamed the "John Woo trailer" because it basically sold Titanic as an action movie set on a luxury liner. Landau's take: that wasn't their movie. What followed was a long back-and-forth with the studio, which started with calm logic and ended with a lot of yelling.
One screening that changed everything
The compromise: test the longer trailer in front of the people who actually book theaters. Landau and company convinced Paramount chair and CEO Sherry Lansing to run it at ShoWest, the National Association of Theatre Owners conference in Las Vegas. It was the first Titanic footage anyone outside the studio had seen, and the room was tight with nerves.
Then Kurt Russell, who was in the audience, stood up and basically said he'd pay 10 bucks just to watch that trailer again. That reaction mattered. Soon after, the Motion Picture Association gave special permission to release the full four-minute-and-two-second trailer in theaters. And here's the funny thing: even the hit pieces started hedging. Articles would trash the production, then admit the movie itself might be great. Landau calls that the turning point.
How they turned it around, step by step
- After brutal buzz and a $200 million spend over five years, Landau pushes the case that the trailer is everything.
- The team cuts a 4:02 trailer; Paramount hates it and counters with a shorter, action-forward version the filmmakers reject.
- Escalation follows: reasoning turns to shouting.
- Paramount's Sherry Lansing agrees to test the long cut at ShoWest in Las Vegas.
- The reaction (including a thumbs-up from Kurt Russell) is strong enough to get MPA sign-off to release the full 4:02 trailer.
- Media narrative softens from "this will bomb" to "this might be good," and momentum finally shifts.
From near-wreck to record-breaker
We know the rest. Titanic didn't just work; it rewrote the record books, ultimately grossing more than $2.2 billion worldwide. Landau's version of events, shared in an excerpt from his memoir "The Bigger Picture" published by Variety, is a reminder that sometimes the difference between a punchline and a juggernaut is four minutes and two seconds of the right footage.