Rarely if ever does a film achieve the level of critical and commercial success that James Cameron's Titanic enjoyed in 1997. Widely expected to be a commercial flop after a long and troubled production, James Cameron's film stayed #1 at the box office for a practically unheard-of 15 straight weeks, bringing audiences back over and over again to experience its opulently produced three-hour-plus spectacle. A number of factors contributed to the film's popularity, including Celine Dion's smash hit single "My Heart Will Go On," Leonardo DiCaprio's skyrocketing stock as a hip young star, and the film's reputation as a magnificently produced tearjerker, equally compelling to both male and female viewers.
As an action-packed melodrama, Titanic was particularly notorious for making audiences weep, even men. The film is often included on shortlists of films that make men cry, a trend parodied by Woody Harrelson's character in the 2009 film Zombieland, when he mentions, "I haven't cried like that since Titanic." Some critics, like Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times, criticized the film for hearkening back to hoary melodramatic cliches that undermine the film's quality rather than supporting it. "What really brings on the tears," Turan wrote in his review, "is Cameron's insistence that writing this kind of movie is within his abilities. Not only is it not, it is not even close."
Other critics, however, were overwhelmingly positive in their appraisal of the film, such as Janet Maslin of the New York Times, who commented that the film was the most sublime American melodrama since Gone With the Wind. After garnering a record-tying 14 Academy Award nominations, Titanic was the presumptive favorite to win Best Picture in 1998, which it did, collecting eleven Oscars in sum. The film's runaway success and near-universal popularity inevitably led to a backlash against its perceived cheesiness and melodramatic excess.
The film's legacy as the most dominant blockbuster of the 1990s can never be denied, although James Cameron's 2009 science-fiction film Avatar eventually displaced it as the most profitable film ever made. Young directors like Xavier Dolan have called the film an inspiration, with Dolan commenting in a Vanity Fair interview that for him, "Titanic was the impetus to all passions." The film remains a cultural touchstone for a generation of American film-goers, with many of its lines—"I'm the king of the world!", "He exists now only in my memory...," "A woman's heart is a deep ocean of secrets"—entering the pantheon of film quotes. In 2017, James Cameron re-released the film in 3D to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of its initial release.
