James Cameron's Titanic, a $200 million epic about the 1912 shipwreck, overtook Star Wars to become the highest-grossing film of all time domestically, having already dominated global box office for weeks. The film's success, driven by repeat viewings and a cultural phenomenon around leads Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, eventually made it the first film to earn over $1 billion worldwide.
Titanic's production had been plagued by cost overruns, delays, and skeptical press coverage predicting a historic flop; budget estimates ballooned past $200 million, an unprecedented sum in 1997, and journalists openly speculated that director James Cameron had sunk his own career alongside the ship.
Instead, the film became a cultural juggernaut. Audiences, particularly teenage girls, returned to theaters repeatedly, some claiming to have seen it a dozen times or more, drawn by the doomed romance between Jack and Rose as much as the meticulously recreated disaster sequences. Celine Dion's theme song 'My Heart Will Go On' saturated radio airwaves throughout the film's run.
On this day, box office trackers confirmed Titanic's domestic earnings had surpassed the $461 million adjusted mark set by the original Star Wars in 1977, a benchmark many industry observers considered nearly untouchable. The film's momentum barely slowed, eventually crossing $600 million domestically and over $1.8 billion worldwide, a record it held for over a decade until Cameron's own Avatar dethroned it in 2010. The victory validated Cameron's stubborn insistence on scale and spectacle, and it cemented Titanic's eleven-Oscar sweep months later as something more than a fluke.