Even though it fell into the tricky disaster film category and lasted 3 hours and 14 minutes, Titanic (1997) was a huge theater success, earning over $2.2 billion worldwide (current inflation adjustment brings that number to $3.6 billion). Oh, and it won the Oscar and took the careers of Kate Winslet and even more so, Leonardo DiCaprio to film star heights.
So, for a regular moviegoer it might be a given that the film executives had great foresight and the film had an easy ride to get to theaters, right? Well, wrong! Before it reached the massive audiences it actually did, Titanic, James Cameron who directed the film and the whole production team, including late Oscar-winning producer Jon Landau had quite a rough ride to make the film work, with one surprising thing saving Titanic’s day.
Titanic broke the film industry trailer rules
Very often, creating a movie trailer that will entice the audiences to see the forthcoming feature, can make or break the film. Yet, it is probably not known to the wider audiences that Hollywood has quite stringent rules about how long a movie trailer can last and what it should contain.
According to MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America), and this rule is still formally in force, a movie trailer can last 150 seconds (2:30 minutes) with a goal of presenting the sense of the upcoming film without giving away too much of its content. Some trailers hit the mark with the audiences, some give too much, while there is also quite a few of those that the audiences thing gives too much about the movie.
Now, when Cameron and his team were preparing Titanic, they had quite an enormous budget of $200 million, creating a film that lasted over three hours. As the film was being developed, doubts about it begun floating around Hollywood, predicting it will become a big flop. Still, as late Jon Landau reveals in his posthumous memoir titled The Bigger Picture, it was a rule-breaking more than four-minute long trailer that turned it into a success!
Landau explains that the team had a really hard time coming up with a trailer that would convey what Titanic was about in 150 seconds, so it created one that was more than four minutes long. Yet, Paramount distribution and marketing hated it, its head stating that it made him throw up all over his shoes. Instead, Paramount created its own, 2:30 minute trailer, about about which Landau wrote:
"We called it the John Woo trailer," Landau wrote, referencing the renowned Hong Kong action director. "It was all flash cuts and pounding music, gunshots, and screams. It made the movie look like an action flick that happened to take place on the Titanic. It was not our movie."
A battle then ensued between Paramount and the film’s creators which trailer to use, with the latter finally persuading to test the longer trailer at ShoWest, the conference of the National Association of Theatre Owners in Las Vegas. When the trailer was shown, it seems that the room full of executives and film big names went silent, until Kurt Russel stood up and said: 'I'd pay ten dollars just to see that trailer again.’
And it turned out that the trailer’s acceptance made big film history (and big money) for everybody involved.
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