Whilst James Cameron’s “Avatar: The Way of Water” is still atop the box-office, it won’t be the only film he has in cinemas in the coming weeks.
His iconic 1997 love story meets disaster epic “Titanic” hit cinemas 25 years ago and to celebrate the anniversary, the film is scoring a 4K 3D re-release in cinemas on February 10th – right in time for Valentine’s Day a few days later.
In a new interview with SiriusXM, the filmmaker has shared the reason why he thinks it “makes sense” to re-release the three-and-a-half-hour film this year:
“Well, I figured that I was probably not going to be around for the 50th anniversary, so why not celebrate the 25th anniversary? We re-released the film 10 years ago with the 3D conversion, quite successfully, and we thought, ‘OK, there’s another kind of half-generation of people that haven’t seen Titanic in a movie theater and maybe a bunch of nostalgia for, you know, amongst people that have seen it in a movie theater or have always wanted to.
The prior “Titanic” 3D re-release pulled in $343.4 million worldwide, with $145 million of that from China, to become the highest-grossing re-release of all time even as reviews were mixed towards the 3D conversion.
The choice of the specific date to re-release it this time, however was a very deliberate one on Cameron’s part, and it ties into the box-office of the original:
The question was, ‘Okay, what’s the date?’ Well, the date that made sense to me was Valentine’s Day, because in the original release, which was 1997 into 1998, we came out a few days before Christmas. I think it was December 16th. But the highest-grossing single day of the release was Valentine’s Day.
[It’s] kind of obvious why, but very unusual for a film that’s been in the marketplace for two months to have its biggest single performing day. So it’s a celebration of love. It’s a celebration of the movie, at the same time, and it’s a celebration of the success of the movie as well.”
It’s not expected that this re-release will score the same level of success as the last one, that said it faces little competition that weekend with no real challenge until the following Friday when Marvel’s “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” arrives.
