At this point, the idea that anybody would ever bet against James Cameron seems crazy. The man is responsible for three of the highest-grossing movies ever made, and with Avatar: Fire and Ash opening in a couple of months, that number may become four. And yet, there was a time when people were unsure that a Cameron movie would be a massive hit, with quite a few being less than certain about Titanic.
Next month, the memoirs of Cameron’s late producing partner Jon Landau, who passed away last year, will be posthumously published, and Variety has an excerpt from the book, titled The Bigger Picture. In the piece, Landau discusses the difficulty with Titanic’s first trailer, which clocked in at an epic four minutes long. When the cut was first sent to the film’s two studios, Fox and Paramount, it was not received well, with Landau relating…
About two hours later, [executive producer] Rae Sanchini got a call from Rob Friedman, the head of distribution and marketing at Paramount. ‘I saw your trailer,’ he apparently told her, ‘and I’m throwing up all over my shoes.’
To be sure, a four-minute trailer is a long trailer for a movie. That said, Titanic is a long movie, and Landau indicates that they simply couldn’t figure out how to boil the movie down any further without losing important elements that were needed to show what the movie was.
Alternate cuts of the trailer were attempted, but Landau says they made Titanic look like an action movie. Landau reveals they were ultimately able to get the approval of Paramount’s CEO to test the trailer at SHOWest, the precursor to the modern CinemaCon event in Las Vegas. If theater owners gave their approval, the trailer could go forward.
Landau says that support from the trailer came from an unlikely source: Kurt Russell, who was there because he also had a Paramount movie getting ready to release, the thriller Breakdown. Landau describes the scenario saying…
I sat nervously as our trailer played in that banquet hall in Las Vegas, and just as it ended, Kurt Russell loudly announced, ‘I’d pay ten dollars just to see that trailer again.’
Whether the words of Kurt Russell were simply echoing how everybody felt, or Russell actually helped nudge the consensus on the trailer, is unclear. However, theater owners did approve of the four-minute trailer. This actually required a special dispensation from the MPA, as the trailer exceeded limits at the time. And it is one hell of a trailer.
The trailer may be guilty of giving away the entire plot of the movie, but history has shown that didn’t exactly matter. People saw Titanic in droves, making it the highest-grossing movie ever made for years.
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