Why Titanic is the Top Grossing Movie

Category: Media

Published: 12/23/2009 02:03 a.m.

As probably most of you know, Titanic is the Top Grossing Film of all time. While it was made by an award-winning Director and stared an award-winning cast, it breaks the mold of many of the other top grossing films. Why is it on top of the world? I'm glad you asked.First, lets examine many of the other movies in the list for common trends and see which of those features are present in Titanic.

Sequels

From the wikipedia list, we have to scan all the way down to #12,JurassicPark, to find another non-sequel film.The Lord of the Rings Trilogy and the Harry Potter series have all done very well, and take up a majority of the Top 10. Even further down the list we find more trilogies and sequels including the Spider-Man films, Star Wars films, Shrek films, and (while not exactly sequels) the yearly Disney animations.

Sequels build hype and carry forward a large amount of a following from movie to movie. While some do not receive favorable reviews from critics, these reviews are usually ignored, and these movies become "must-see" films. The audience is already familiar with the characters, which is one less obstacle to fill the seats on opening weekend. Being part of a sequel gives you a pretty big leg up, especially in the last few years. Titanic is not a sequel film.

Book Based

The Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Lord of the Rings Trilogies are all based on novels. These novels are from different periods of time but have all been immensely popular and have garnered larger and larger audiences with the arrival of the movies. The characters are known and often the special effects are what make these movies chart-toppers. People to see things they have only imagined, and the shared experience of seeing something you imagined one way with someone else who imagined it differently is hard to get anywhere but the cinema. Titanic was based on a story many people knew of, but it was not a book. And the characters in Titanic were not part of the shared story everyone knew.

Death

Almost all of the top films have a great bit of violence. While blood and gore are not often seen, lasers, magic, dinosaurs and large-scale battles are what make some of these epic films so popular. Death is a common trend, and can be shown in the thousands so long as individual deaths are not seen up close. Jurassic Park shows gruesome deaths, along with some of the ways the bad guys die in Lord of the Rings. The Dark Knight is another very violent film. Titanic shows quite a bit of this, including people freezing to death and the memorable man falling and hitting the blades in the back of the boat. Overall the death toll in Titanic is high, which seems to be a requirement to become a top-selling live action movie.

Pg-13 Rating

Because of all of the violence, and the inclusion of bad language and suggestive elements, many of the films come with a PG-13 rating, which exposes them to what is likely the largest audience base. R ratings keep younger movie-goers out, especially the teenagers who spend every weekend at the theater. The G and even some PG films are also not interesting enough for some of the older audiences who crave a bit more out of the movies they see. PG-13 gets the teens, the elders, and all those in between.

The Disney movies are not PG-13, however they sell tickets to both children and the parents that accompany them, thus gaining a large share of audience through what I would call double-sales. Other than the animations, the rest are PG-13, and often on the end closer to R. Titanic is no exception, and it even pushes the envelope in a way that no other film at that time was able to do. If it had been given an R rating, it would have had little chance to sell so well. This leads me to the final point.

The Titanic Difference

Full Frontal nudity. No other PG-13 film of great popularity has it. Many films include sex scenes in some limited fashion, but no one has full frontal like Titanic. It is done in an artsy way, so it was somehow able to pass the MPAA's regulations. At the time of the films release, nudity was not so easily found on the internet, so for the 12-16 age group of movie goers, this film had quite an advantage. This was not particularly important in opening weekend, but rather on second and third (and fourth) viewings. A group of teenage girls who cared about the love story could get a group of guys to go again with them because they cared about the nudity. Titanic set it self apart by being a movie you went to see again and again.

This still hasn't been seen again in a PG-13 movie, and I would wager that full frontal nudity in another great movie with some of the above qualities could be a candidate to take down Titanic in the top spot. Or, at least it could have 10 years ago. The internet does not make this spectacle so important, so it's value today is not the same titanic value as in the past.

The other factor is the epic love story, which was not featured in many of these films. While this could be said to be a big deal, there have been many love story movies made, and I do not believe it was a driving force in Titanic's success. Nudity in Titanic is not the only reason it is the top grossing film of all time, but I argue here that may be the most important catalyst in helping that movie climb the ranks, and could have been the difference-maker for this great film.