Titanic is a 1997 romantic drama / disaster film directed, written and co-produced by James Cameron about the sinking of the RMS Titanic. It stars Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio as Rose DeWitt Bukater and Jack Dawson respectively, members of different social classes who fall in love aboard the ill-fated 1912 maiden voyage of the ship. Bill Paxton plays Brock Lovett, the leader of a treasure hunting expedition, while Gloria Stuart has the role of the elderly Rose (renamed Calvert), who narrates the story in 1996. The film co-stars Billy Zane as Rose's fiancé, Caledon Hockley, Kathy Bates as Margaret "Molly" Brown, Frances Fisher as Rose's mother, Ruth, and Danny Nucci as Jack's best friend, Fabrizio De Rossi.

Because Titanic was not completed in mid-1997, problems rose in Hollywood and there was discussion of trimming its length, but director Cameron fought to release it without additional editing. It was released to North America in theatres by Paramount Pictures (worldwide by 20th Century Fox) on December 19, 1997, and while it performed well in its first weekend, it was not until the new year that the film would reach its highest ticket sales. Unadjusted for inflation, it holds the record for the highest-grossing film of all time, generating over US$1.8 billion worldwide. In 1998 it was nominated for fourteen Academy Awards and won eleven, including the title of 1997's Best Picture (the second Paramount/Fox co-production with that honor in 3 years after 1995's Braveheart). Titanic shares the record for the most Academy Award wins with Ben-Hur (1959) and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003). It is sometimes considered one of the greatest films of all time.

At a time in 1996, Mr Brock Lovett and his team are underneath the Atlantic Ocean, searching for a very valuable necklace, entitled the 'Heart of the Ocean'. They are keeping the necklace's existence and there search for it a secret, and know that it had belonged to a seventeen-year-old girl named Rose DeWitt Bukater, a passenger on the voyage, Titanic, which had sunk eighty-four years earlier (even though it had been believed to be unsinkable), after colliding with an iceberg.

They look in the areas of the sunken Titanic where they thought it would be, but find a case. When they get back up on their boat, they break the case, and for a few moments, are excited and look for the necklace. There is nothing in the box and there is much disappointment. However, they manage to find a muddy folder. They find that inside it, there is a drawing of a young girl nude, who also happens to be wearing the lost 'Heart of the Ocean'. At the corner of the paper, the date is written '14 April, 1912', the day when Titanic hit an iceberg.

The discovery of the drawing is put on television. An almost 101-year-old Rose Dawson Calvert, who lives with her granddaughter Lizzy, sees it and is incredibly surprised. She phone calls Mr Lovett, and asks him whether or not he had found the necklace. Mr Lovett asks her if she knows who the woman in the picture is, to which Rose replies, "Oh, yes. The woman in the picture is me." Soon, Rose and Lizzy have boarded a helicopter to join Mr Lovett and his team on the boat.

When Rose has settled in on the boat, she is shown some of her belongings which had gone under the water with Titanic. She then sits down, with Lizzy, Mr Lovett, and the team in front of her, and begins to tell the story of Titanic.

The year then goes back to 1912, where everyone is boarding Titanic, including a seventeen-year-old Rose DeWitt Bukater, her mother Ruth, and fiance, Caledon Hockley. While they board, a young man named Jack Dawson, and his best friend Fabrizio, are in a pub, playing cards with two other men. Whichever pair win the game, will take the tickets and board Titanic. Jack wins the game, and so he and Fabrizio excitedly grab the tickets and run off with their bags to board the Titanic - the grandest and largest ship in the world, and said to be unsinkable, being boarded at London and sailing off to New York.

Not long afterwards, Jack, who is also an artist and third-class passenger, is sitting on the deck of the ship with Fabrizio, doing a sketch of a father and his daughter. They both meet Tommy Ryan, who becomes their good friend. While they talk, it is then that Jack first sees Rose, who is in first class. However, Rose is unhappy because of the recent events that have happened in her life; her father had passed away and accordingly left his wife and daughter with nothing. Rose's mother, Ruth, is now forcing her daughter to marry Caledon Hockley, so that the family will stay in their high social class, even though Rose does not love Cal at all. She is overwhelmed that one night, she runs off on to the deck of Titanic and is about to commit suicide by going over the rail and, nearly, jumping. Jack had been on the deck as well and sees her run past, and tries to convince her to come back on the deck while she is off the railing. He eventually has talked Rose back into her senses, and grabs her hand and they introduce themselves to each other. As he helps Rose come back on to the deck, Rose accidently slips and almost falls into the freezing ocean, but is helped back up by Jack. Once they are both back on the deck, officers had before heard Rose's screams and came to see what happened. They mistake the situation and believed that Jack was going to rape Rose. Jack is arrested, but Rose defends him and he is let go. Rose believes that Jack should be awarded for saving her, so Jack is invited to join her and the first class for dinner the next night. When Rose is in her bedroom, Cal enters and gives her his gift, the 'Heart of the Ocean'.

The next day, Rose goes down to the third class looking for Jack, and finds him. They once again go on to the deck and begin talking. Jack tells her how years earlier, both his parents had died, and he lived his life doing sketches. Rose also thanks him for saving her, and tells him of her forced engagement. Jack also shows Rose his folder of sketches, which Rose finds incredible. They spend most of the day together, and part when dinner will be given soon. Jack and Rose meet again at the staircase, and go into the dining room to join the fellow first-class passengers for dinner. Everyone, except for Cal and Ruth, seems to like Jack and the things he talks to them about. Towards the end of dinner, he leaves, but gives Rose a small note, telling her to meet him at the clock near the staircase. Jack then takes her down to a third-class party, and both of them immensely enjoy their time with dancing. At the same time, both Jack and Rose's affection for one another are growing.

The next morning, Rose and Cal are having breakfast, where Cal furiously knocks the table over and explains to Rose that she will not again behave how she did at the third-class party, and that she must honour him as his future wife. Ruth also confronts Rose, selfishly telling her that she is never to see Jack again. Rose again is feeling pressured, and while she is out on the deck with her mother, Captain Smith, Cal, and Mr Andrews, she is taken to the side by Jack and he confronts her. Rose tries to avoid their growing affection and leaves him, feeling that she must do her responsibilities. But later that day, she realises that she has made the wrong decision and should follow her heart, so she goes back up to the deck where Jack is, looking into the ocean, and smiles when he sees her. He tells her to close her eyes, and leads her to stand up against the railing. He spreads her arms, holds on to her, and tells her to open her eyes. As the wind is blowing, they turn to each other and kiss for the first time.

Jack and Rose then go into her rooms, where she asks him to sketch her, wearing nothing except for the 'Heart of the Ocean'. After the sketch is done, Cal sends Mr Lovejoy to see what Rose is doing, and she and Jack are chased by him. They manage to escape, and run into the cargo, where they consummate their relationship. In the mean time, Captain Smith is ignoring the warnings of any icebergs, and the ship continues to sail at full-speed. When Jack and Rose go back up on deck and kiss again, an iceberg is seen and the crew and engineers do their best to avoid it. However, it is too late, and the ship collides with the iceberg. Jack and Rose see the iceberg and go back to tell Ruth and Cal about the emergency, only that before, Cal saw the nude drawing of Rose and had read the letter that she left for him. Furious, he frames Jack by having Mr Lovejoy sneak the 'Heart of the Ocean' into Jack's pocket, and Jack is soon arrested and locked up in a lower room. Rose is very confused but realises that Jack would never have done such a thing. As she is with her mother, Cal, and Molly Brown, about to board a lifeboat, Rose runs away from them and asks Mr Andrews where they would put someone after being arrested. Mr Andrews tells her and Rose manages to find Jack in the room, but also to find that it is flooding quickly. Rose tries to find help, but in the end can only get the nearby axe and save Jack that way, and she does so. In the mean time, the lifeboats are being boarded with mothers and children only. Jack and Rose head back up to the deck where the lifeboats are being boarded, and Cal finds them. He and Jack put Rose on to a lifeboat, but Rose jumps back on to Titanic, realising that no matter what, she does not want to part from Jack, and they both reunite at the staircase. Cal, who has been watching, is so infuriated, that he grabs Lovejoy's pistol and chases and shoots at Rose and Jack. They escape, and Cal runs out of bullets. Jack and Rose run a little further, and try to see if Cal is still after them. Cal is still at the staircase which is flooding, and realises that the jacket he had put on Rose before she got on a lifeboat, has the 'Heart of the Ocean' in one of its pockets. He gives up and simply goes back to the deck and goes on a lifeboat, but only had selfishly saved his own life by pretending to be the father of a crying girl. Jack and Rose are standing at the stairs in a flooding hallway, when they hear a little boy screaming and crying without a parent. They decide to take him, when his real father comes and takes his son from them, but both of them die when water comes crashing through a large blocking door. Jack and Rose manage to escape, but nearly drown when they are trying to unlock a locked gate, and head back up on to the deck.

Meanwhile, there are almost no lifeboats left. Captain Smith appears to be watching but does not attempt to save his own life. He enters a flooding room and shuts the door behind him. Violin players continue to play a sad song, even though the ship is sinking quickly. Not long later, Captain Smith is still in the room and is looking around at the windows to see that there is nothing outside but water. There is much pressure and all the windows suddenly break, letting water violently rush in, soon to kill Captain Smith. Jack's friends, Fabrizio and Tommy are also killed - Fabrizio by being crushed by the falling tunnel, and Tommy by being accidently shot by First Officer Murdoch (Murdoch later shoots himself when he realises that he shot Tommy before thinking). When Jack and Rose are heading back up to the deck, they come across the dining room, where they find Mr Andrews, the inventor of Titanic, patiently waiting for the ship to entirely sink. Rose asks him if he won't even try to save his life, to which Mr Andrews only replies, "I'm sorry that I didn't build you a stronger ship, young Rose." He gives Rose his life-jacket, and Rose embraces him goodbye. When she and Jack reach the deck, they find that there are no lifeboats left, and have no other option but to get to the top of the ship and remain there till the ship sinks entirely. They do so, and, at Titanic's final moments, the lights go off and the ship breaks in half. Titanic plunges into the sea, but later goes right up again, where it detaches from the other broken half, and soon the other half goes into the sea as well, where Jack and Rose are right at the railing. Once all of Titanic is in the sea, Jack and Rose are struggling to keep hold of each other under the water, and let go because of the pressure. They manage to reunite, and swim to a ruined lifeboat, which only will fit for one of them, and Jack leads Rose on to it, while Jack holds on to her hand in the freezing water. Fifteen hundred people had plunged into the water with them, and are all slowly dying of hypothermia. Jack, realising he himself is going to die, makes Rose promise him that no matter what, she will make herself survive the night, also saying that she will die as a very, very old lady in her bed, sleeping. He also makes her promise that she will live on, get married, have children, and accomplish her goals in life. Rose promises him.

Later, Officer Lowe puts all his passengers on the lifeboat on to another lifeboat, and heads back to where the Titanic sank in an empty one with other officers, looking for any survivors. Rose is still alive, and is looking up into the starry sky. She sees the lifeboat and tries to wake up Jack, who is still floating next to her. She soon realises that he has died, and sees the lifeboat floating away. She lays her head down and closes her eyes, letting herself to eventually die with him, but soon remembers the promise she had made to Jack before he died. She calls out for Officer Lowe to come back, but, from being in the freezing water, cannot be heard because of her weak voice. She is determined to keep her promise to Jack, and has no option but to let go of him. She kisses his hand and once again says she will never let go of her promise, and lets him go and watches as he sinks into the water, and cries. She then gets off the flattened boat, and swims to a dead man nearby and calls out again by blowing into his whistle, and she is soon saved.

A quiet Rose then boards on to the Carpathia, a ship where all the other survivors are. Rose is sitting down, wrapped in a blanket, and sees Cal, who is looking for her. Rose hides herself, and the last is seen of Cal when he cannot find Rose. Rose, arriving at New York, quietly stands at night in the pouring rain looking up at the Statue of Liberty. An officer approaches her and asks for her name, to which Rose gives the name of Rose Dawson, implying of her commitment to Jack and their plans for marriage.

In 1996, the old Rose, after explaining her story, says how she had never mentioned Jack to anyone, and that he exists only in her memory. Later that night, she goes on to the deck of the ship, and stands against the railing. In her hand she has the 'Heart of the Ocean', which she had found in her pocket when she was in New York. For a second, she holds it tight, and then drops it into the ocean, the site where Titanic sunk and where Jack had died.

Soon, as she is in her bed sleeping, photographs of Rose are shown in her younger years, all of them showing Rose's accomplishments - doing what she had planned to do with Jack, including going horseback riding at Santa Monica Pier, with a roller-coaster in the background, which she and Jack planned to ride. After the photographs, Rose is seen with her eyes closed. The scene then goes to under the water to the sunken Titanic, and shows everybody who had died with the ship. Jack is shown waiting at the staircase just as he had been before, where he reaches out his hand. A young Rose then takes hold of his hand and they kiss as the crowd applauds.

A brand-new studio was built for the making of this film, at Popotla, near Rosarito Beach in Mexico, just 40km south of the international border. A giant tower crane was used for aerial tracking shots of the 90% scale model of Titanic that was built in the ocean. When this epic disaster film was not finished in time for its scheduled July 1997 release, shockwaves were sent through Hollywood; executives started wondering if a situation similar to that of Heaven's Gate would occur. The releasing studios 20th Century Fox (which handled the film's distribution outside the U.S.) and Paramount Pictures (which handled the U.S. distribution) panicked. With a budget of $200 million, Titanic became the costliest film of all time by mid-1997 (now the fifth most expensive movie ever). When director James Cameron delivered the film to Paramount, it ran over three hours and speculation arose whether he would work in Hollywood again. Cameron defended his production and threatened most executives that they were not going to shorten the film's length. Cameron admitted that he felt as though Titanic would be unsuccessful.

Filming occurred from 16 September 1996 to 23 March 1997.

The film garnered mostly positive reviews from critics. It has been a "Certified Fresh" film on Rotten Tomatoes with 82% overall approval from critics and 81% from users. The film also received a 74 out 100 metascore on Metacritic, classified as a generally favorable reviewed film. The metacritic users also awarded it with a 7.4/10 average rating.

Roger Ebert said "It is flawlessly crafted, intelligently constructed, strongly acted and spellbinding... Movies like this are not merely difficult to make at all, but almost impossible to make well. The technical difficulties are so daunting that it's a wonder when the filmmakers are also able to bring the drama and history into proportion. I found myself convinced by both the story and the saga." It was one of his top ten films of 1997.

Some reviewers felt that the story and dialogue were weak while the visuals were spectacular. Kenneth Turan's review in the LA Times was particularly scathing. Dismissing the emotive elements, he says "what really brings on the tears is Cameron's insistence that writing this kind of movie is within his abilities. Not only isn't it, it isn't even close." Barbara Shulgasser of San Francisco Examiner gave Titanic one star out of four, citing a friend as saying "the number of times in this unbelievably badly written script that the two [lead characters] refer to each other by name was an indication of just how dramatically the script lacked anything more interesting for the actors to say."

The film received steady attendance after opening in North America on December 19, 1997. By Sunday that same weekend, theaters were beginning to sell out. The film debuted with $28,638,131. By the new year Titanic had increased in popularity and theaters continued selling out; unusually, it took fifteen weeks for its weekly gross to decline 50%, the most for any film in the 1990s. By March 1998 it was the first film to earn more than $1 billion worldwide. The movie stayed in theatres for over 6 months. Some theatres in South Africa ran it for longer than a year, bringing in approximately R40 Million ($5,490,671)

Titanic holds the record for the highest-grossing film of all time in the North American market with $600,788,188. The previous North American record of $460,998,000 was held by Star Wars (another 20th Century Fox film). Unadjusted for the effect of inflation, Titanic also holds the record for the highest-grossing movie of all time in the worldwide box office with $1,835,300,000 . The second place Return of the King is about $700 million short of Titanic's record. However, it will only place sixth, if the ticket price is adjusted for inflation worldwide. Gone with the Wind would be the number one movie on this ranking.

Titanic began its awards sweep starting with the Golden Globes, winning four including Best Film (Drama), Best Director, Best Original Score and Best Song. Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Gloria Stuart and James Cameron's screenplay were also nominated but lost. It won the ACE "Eddie" Award, ASC Award, Art Directors Guild Award, Cinema Audio Society Award, Screen Actors Guild Awards, (Best Supporting Actress Gloria Stuart), The Directors Guild of America Award and Broadcast Film Critics Association Award (Best Director James Cameron), and The Producer Guild of America Awards, It was also nominated for ten BAFTA awards including Best Film and Director.

It tied All About Eve for having the most Oscar nominations in history with 14. It won Best Picture and Best Director. It also picked up best costume design, visual effects, sound, sound effects, original dramatic score, film editing, song, art direction and cinematography. Kate Winslet, Gloria Stuart and the Make-up artists were the only other nominees that failed to win. James Cameron's original screenplay and Leonardo DiCaprio were not nominated. It was the second movie to win eleven Academy Awards after Ben-Hur. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King would also match the record in 2004.

The love theme song also won the Grammy Awards for Best Song Written Specifically for a Motion Picture or for Television. It also won Best Movie and Best Male Performance for Leonardo DiCaprio at the MTV Movie Awards. The film was voted as Best Film at the People's Choice Awards. It won various awards outside the United States, including the Awards of the Japanese Academy as the Best Foreign Film of the year. Titanic eventually won 87 awards and had additional 47 nominations from various award giving bodies around the world.

Since its release, Titanic has been constantly appearing on the AFI's award winning 100 Years... series. It is ranked #25 in the most thrilling movies of all time and #37 in the most romantic movies of all time. The song "My Heart Will Go On" is at #14 in the best movie songs of all time, and the line uttered by Jack Dawson played by Leonardo DiCaprio, "I'm the king of the world!" is at #100 as one of the best movie quotes in history. Titanic is also one of the 44 new eligible films in contention to the updated version of AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies, since it wasn't eligible when the first list was revealed. This will count down the best films in American cinema. The list will be unveiled in June 2007.

There has been word of a re-release of Titanic due to its successful original run as well as the advances in special effects and digital enhancement. Titanic's director, James Cameron, is said to be considering a re-release of his film in digital 3D.

In one scene, First Officer William Murdoch is shown to shoot and kill some passengers during the frenzy to get to the lifeboats. Ashamed, he commits suicide. When his nephew Scott Murdoch saw this, he objected since Murdoch neither shot any passengers nor commited suicide (although Fifth Officer Lowe did fire warning shots during the course of the evening). A few months later, Fox Vice-president Scott Neeson went to Dalbeattie, where Murdoch lived, to deliver a personal apology, and also presented a £5000 donation to Dalbeattie High School to boost the school's William Murdoch Memorial Prize.

The soundtrack CD for Titanic was composed by James Horner and sold more than twenty-seven million copies, notable because it included only one pop song with lyrics. The soundtrack includes performances from the Norwegian singer Sissel Kyrkjebø, and the famous Canadian diva Céline Dion. It became a worldwide success, and led to the release of a second volume that contained a mixture of previously unreleased soundtrack recordings with newly-recorded performances of some of the songs in the film, including one track recorded by Enya's sister, Máire Brennan of the Irish band Clannad. "Hymn to the Sea" features Bad Haggis's Eric Rigler on the uilleann pipes and whistles.

James Horner wrote the song "My Heart Will Go On" in secret with Will Jennings because Cameron did not want any songs with singing in the film. Dion agreed to record a demo with the persuasion of her husband René Angélil. Horner waited until Cameron was in an appropriate mood before presenting him with the song. After playing it several times, Cameron declared its approval, although worried that he would have been criticized for "going commercial at the end of the movie". It eventually won the 1997 Academy Award for Best Original Song.