Alison: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart and welcome back to our Titanic hour. In our last segment, we talked about Titanic, a parody of James Cameron's 1997 film, and of the culture surrounding it. The film is having its silver anniversary and will be re-released in theaters next month. There's been 25 years of debate about whether Jack could fit on that door, 25 years of parodies and homages from countless iterations of Draw Me Like One of Your French girls and this from The Office's, Michael Scott.

Michael Scott: Hey, look, I'm the king of the world.

Alison: When the film was released, it was one of the most expensive of its time, costing more than $200 million. That's a little more than 1 million per minute of scream time with its initial release and re-releases in 2012 and 2017. Titanic has grossed more than $2 billion worldwide. We want to talk about how James Cameron's Titanic has become such a ubiquitous bit of culture, worthy of parody and debate, and countless rewatches and we want you in on the conversation if this movie has meant something to you over the last 25 years, give us a call and tell us about it. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC.

What made the story of Titanic stick in your brain? How has time made changed the way you feel about it, for better or for worse? Do you remember who you were with when you went to see Titanic? 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC, or tweet to us or send us a DM on Instagram, @allofitwnyc. We're going to have a little bit of fun. Joining me to take those calls, please welcome Alissa Wilkinson, senior culture reporter and critic at Vox. She wrote an article for the film's 20th anniversary called, Titanic left an indelible mark on moviegoers’ hearts in 1997. I finally get why. Alissa, welcome.

Alissa: It's great to be here.

Alison: For the full disclosure, you really hadn't watched Titanic until 2017 and you write that it blew your mind when you first watched it 20 years after its initial release. How did that 20 years later of it all change the way the film landed?

Alissa: I was 14 when it came out and I didn't see it for various reasons, having to do with how I was brought up in the place that movies had in my life. I was 34 when I first saw it. Watching it as a 34-year-old, I expected to be skeptical and maybe a little bit, I don't know, isn't it for teenagers? Something like that. Sitting there, I felt I was transported back to my 14-year-old self, just like the romance and the spectacle of it all.

I think sometimes, as a movie critic, I get jaded about all these big spectacle movies, but this was something I'd never seen before, quite literally. I really feel the romance of it and the danger and the disaster movie of it really swept over me at that time.

Alison: Let's set the scene. It was 1997 was the year of Good Will Hunting. It was the year that Dreamworks released its first film and we should say, just so we know that, Titanic was released in December 2022 probably because of the Oscar stuff, but the big deal the following year. That's the timing we should discuss. When we think about the films that were coming out of that time, Good Will Hunting was a big movie. What was the prevailing wisdom in the industry about what films did well at the box office at that time?

Alissa: I think a lot of people were-- I was saying when I wrote about it that I remember distinctly waking up to my radio alarm and hearing talk radio hosts talking about how well nobody was going to go see this Titanic movie because there was a new James Bond movie coming out and people love James Bond and doesn't everybody know how Titanic ends? Also, there really was this sense that here were two young stars. It was Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet who were 22 and 21. This is a movie for teenage girls.

That's just how it presented, even though the director was James Cameron who had previously made Aliens and Terminator and people knew that. The ideas that in the late '90s is that we're looking for these big action movies but we're also moving into this world where known IP is something that brings people into the theater. It was a great time for movies. If you go watch movies from the late '90s, they're really phenomenal and fun, but it's always meant true that Hollywood and maybe American culture at large discounts anything that looks like it's a soapy romance for teenage girls. In Titanic, I think turned that on its head at least for a while.

Alison: Let's talk to Michael from Bridgewater's Long Island. Hi, Michael. Thanks for calling All Of It.

Michael: Hi, Alison. Thank you for taking my call. Titanic is definitely hands down my favorite movie. I think it was also one of the best movies that has ever been made. The crazy thing is because I know James Cameron wants to remake this film to make it even more realistic, where it's like a less dramatization from what we had seen in the '90s, but it's so interesting the amount of facets that were done in terms of creative decisions because there was a lot of talk about Tom Cruise being an earlier choice for the role of Jack, but he turned out to be too expensive.

It was also rumored that Gwyneth Paltrow was in the line to play Rose, but she didn't think the film was going to go anywhere, which was crazy because it just the whole cinematography, everything. The movie had so much to it and the first time I saw it, it actually gave me nightmares because I thought I was on that trip and I couldn't get to a lifeboat.

Alison: Michael, thank you for calling in. Alissa, you talked about this a little bit in your piece how this is a romance, but we should also remember it's a disaster movie too and that combination was really potent.

Alissa: It's a little over three hours long, which is a James Cameron's favorite length. It really is almost exactly two movies stuck together. If you time it out, that pivots right in the middle from this romance to a disaster movie. I think it really holds up with the best disaster movies and has an emotional core to it that sometimes doesn't exist in other films that we think of as great disaster movies because we haven't gotten to love the characters and really root for them the way that we have with this movie.

Of course, at the beginning of Titanic, we do actually know what happens at the end of Titanic and who's going to live and who won't spoiler if you haven't seen it but that even lends more emotional heft to it, and is wonderful and does give it that immersive experience.

Alison: Let's talk to Jesse calling in from Manhattan. Hi, Jesse, thanks for calling All Of It.

Jesse: Hi. Titanic was the second movie I ever saw in theaters. I think I was in the fourth grade at the time. I mostly remember having to hold my bladder for the three-hour length of it and also the most memorable scene because I was a fourth grader was, of course, the drawing scene, but I do know that it's set off like an-- I don't want to say an obsession, but my brother got really into it. He was two years younger than me and we both saw at the same time.

He started, I don't know, researching the Titanic or whatever. He grew out of it when he hit high school, but for the longest time, he had all this Titanic information stuff.

Alison: That's so interesting. Thank you, Jesse, for calling in. Listeners, if you have seen the movie Titanic and it's meant something to you, give us a call. 212-433-9692, 212-2433-WNYC. Maybe you want to share where you were when you first saw the film. 212-433-9692. My guest is Alissa Wilkinson, senior culture reporter and critic at Vox. We're talking about Titanic celebrating its 25th anniversary. I want to talk about a little bit about the budget of this film.

As you exec told the LA Times in 1998 that while they were making the movie, "the budget news was so phenomenally bad on a daily basis. We all went through a tough eight or nine months. There had just never been a movie this expensive in history." How did Titanic change the way movies were conceived and green-lit and the way we think about budgets?

Alissa: It was a huge budget. It was over $200 million in 1997 money. That's just so much money, but I think that one trend that we've seen in Hollywood in the time since then in the 25 years is that studios are willing to invest more and more and more money in these huge expensive tentpole movies. You can think about the Marvel movies, for instance, because they're expecting a huge return, not just at home in the US but also worldwide. This movie made, I believe, twice as much money worldwide as it did in the US. It was the biggest grocer of all time until James Cameron made the first Avatar movie. This is a pattern that happens with his movies. Of course, his second Avatar is out right now and just cross the $2 billion mark. I would never bet against James Cameron but also I think the Hollywood system is very much built around seeing something work and then trying to replicate it as much as humanly possible and a movie like Titanic, really made that case that you can spend an ungodly amount of money on a movie, but you will earn it back and way more, if you do it right.

There's a huge cultural footprint to it, just in the way that Hollywood treats the movie business. Let's talk to Alex from Park Slope. Alex, just wasn't in on it. Hey, Alex.

Alex: Hey, I'm sorry to rain on anybody's parade and maybe it's about generation. I'm late Gen X. I was in college when it came out. I just felt oppressed by it because, at that time, it wasn't like where you can find what you want now, you don't have to look at anything else in media. It was everywhere, the song, all of it. I felt strange for not liking it and that there was something wrong with me. The fact that it was this huge deal made out of one of the biggest tragedies of the 20th century, I just didn't get.

I just was not into it. Visually effect, amazing. Other than that, I didn't like it. A lot of people I knew couldn't standard either.

Alison: Alex, thanks for calling in. We're actually going to get into the history, the extraordinary history of it in just a few moments. Part of, I don't know if you were listening earlier, Alissa, we had the creatives behind Titanic, this parody of the film actually. You hear lines drop in the film, draw me like one of your French girls. This ongoing hilarious, ridiculous debate about whether or not at the end, Leo DiCaprio's character Jack could have actually been on that wooden door with Rose when asked about it. Leo DiCaprio just will say no comment. I'm not discussing it.

It's very funny if you've ever seen that clip online. When you think about the fandom of this movie, Alex's side, when you think about the fandom, what impact has it had on its staying power? Because sometimes movies like this have huge fan bases and these go away, but this one is one of those that stayed, it's become cultural wallpaper. I think one piece to note about this is that there were people who went a dozen times to see in theaters in part because it was in theaters for like a year, and in part because the VHS release was in September 1998.

It ran in theaters for a really long time before you could just watch it on your TV at home. This is in the pre-streaming, pre-meaning era, and so you just had to go to the theater to experience it. I think that has a way of breeding a fanatical fandom. Of course, if you're going back and watching and it knits itself into your psyche in a way that becomes really powerful. I think it's also just a really simple story. We know the template. We know what's going to happen. These lines and these images that appear in the film embed themselves into your memory.

Then they're reinforced when they keep coming up on TV shows, on, I don't know, SNL in different kinds of areas. For us, at this point, 25 years later, they really draw us back into, maybe a simpler time for ourselves. I remember being 14, it was a very different than it is now, and the fact that I couldn't stream the movie, that I would've had to go to the theater, that my friends were going to the theaters does, it feels like a different world at this point.

I think that has a real impact on the way that people keep remembering the movie and keep thinking about to the point that if you watch the new Avatar movie, I would say the last third of it feels a lot like an homage to Titanic, which is a neat trick on James Cameron's part, but also is inescapable if you've ever seen Titanic. Let's take one more call. Mike, from Jersey City. Real quick, Mike.

Mike: Hi, Alison. Just a quick story. I took a date to see that movie. After the movie, we both liked it a little bit, but afterwards, she went to go use the restroom and I had some time to stand around in the lobby waiting for her to come out. I was watching all these teenage girls and young women just losing their minds over Leonardo DiCaprio. They were, some were openly weeping and saying, "Oh my God, it's so beautiful, I can't stand it."

When my date came out from the bathroom, I said, "You wouldn't believe what's going on out here. These women are just-- they're going crazy for this actor." She said, "Oh, you think that's an emotional display? You should see what's happening inside the women's bathroom."

Alison: Mike, thanks for the call. My guest has been Alissa Wilkinson, senior culture reporter and critic for Vox. Thanks, listeners for calling in.

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