PT why couldnt TPM challenge Titanic at the box office ?

It`s a question I ask myself a lot lately , sadly the Internet hasn't been able to enlighten me.


TPM is to this day the most anticipated film of all time (TFA close second ), but only made $928 million without its 3d re-release.

Titanic made $1.84bn 2 years earlier and had nowhere near the hype TPM had.

So how could this happen ?
Was Titanic such a surprise hit/phenomenon, or did TPM "disappoint" at the BO as result of the mixed reception etc.!?

Why a disappointment ? Because even if we don't count Titanic, the previous #1 Jurassic park made $914 million- without re-release.
TPM made only 14 million more in 1999 with such a hype.





Titanic actually had a slow start (domestic) , but was incredible strong on the long run, TPM the other way around.


So I wouldn't call the movie a flop ofc, but I expected a little more tbh.

What are your thoughts on this topic ?

PS: This aint a anti PT thread, TPM was actually the first SW movie I've ever seen and I still love the movie to this day and I constantly defend it from all those bandwagon haters on the internet

 

Titanic appeals to a much wider audience (namely: women) than Star Wars. And I think Star Wars at this time was I think (fairly or unfairly) perceived as being boy's movies more than they are now. I think that's the best single explanation, even if the full truth might be a bit more complicated. Did the box office for TPM also suffer a bit because of disappointment in the ranks of the older fans whk probably would have preferred something more akin to the Matrix? Probably, but I have no idea how much. They still saw it at least once obviously, but they were probably less eager to see it again.

 

A big part of it was being released in winter with hardly any competition (same reason avatar and TFA made such a killing).

Other reason is teens/young adult women saw titanic A LOT. And they are a far larger group than the die hard star wars fans who saw TPM multiple times.

 

Titanic also got a boost from winning a billion Oscars. People who probably already new better wound up going to see it thinking it might be good since it won all the awards.

 

Well my first question is what do you want to talk about, domestic or worldwide? Because if you want to talk about worldwide, which is the $1.8 billion compared to $928 million number you brought up. We see that a large part of the gap that you pointed out between the two movies came out of the foreign markets where Titanic did $1.5 billion foreign and TPM did $552 million (sources boxofficemojo.com). Right there is the vast majority of the gap between the two movies. Part of this can be explained by the fact that Star Wars seems to struggle in many different countries for many different reasons (mostly cultural differences it seems). Whereas Titanic, a pretty generic love story (that admittedly resonated with audiences) set against the backdrop of one of the most well known disasters in human history had far more appeal to audiences worldwide.

I also think Torib hit the nail on the head, Titanic had a broader appeal across many different demographics. Whether it be age or sex, Titanic pulled them all in. Especially when it came to women throughout different age groups. They flocked to see the movie for the romance angle, men were either dragged along or went for the spectacle of the disaster itself. Where as Star Wars has always been overwhelmingly heavy in the boys/men demographic. Even TFA, with Rey as the lead, was very heavy in the boys/men demographic as I pointed out in another thread, as per a demographic breakdown that was released for TFA shortly after it was released.

So it's actually easy to see why Titanic was so more popular in the foreign market. Simply put, it had broader appeal across different cultures, different age groups, and between men and women.

If you want to talk about Domestic, as per the chart you posted, well we see that the gap isn't as crazy as it was in the foreign market where Titanic did $659 million and TPM did $475 million. Still a pretty decent difference, but, again easily explainable that Titanic had broader appeal across the many different demographics than TPM would have, no matter what hype was generated for TPM.

As for hype and anticipation, yes TPM was highly anticipated and hyped. However, while Titanic wasn't anticipated it was still hyped big time. Weeks and months ahead of time there were constant news stories, documentaries, articles about how the movie recreated such an historic moment in time. History channel seemingly ran Titanic content 24/7 as did the other "educational" channels. When the movie came out, the fervor over everything Titanic kept going. The media and entertainment industry just wouldn't let it die. It was all free publicity that was a self sustaining fire of popularity and enthusiasm for the movie. Than there was that freakin song.... as much as I liked the movie, I can't stand hearing that song because it played endlessly.

So yes, Titanic wasn't anticipated, but the hype surrounding it was absolutely insane and lasted quite a while.

So in the end, I think you're comparing apples to oranges here. Not sure why... the bottom line should be if you liked the movie, if you enjoyed it, what does it matter what happened at the Box Office.

 

I recall Titanic had tons of hype.

How could anyone spend 200M on a movie?

The fascination with the reproduction of the ship and the cost of the movie.

In terms of box office it just kept making money week after week the way you could then but not now.

It made 28M it's first week which was low even then but the audience kept coming back week after week like nothing seen since probably ANH.

 

I'd say since E.T.

And then the next one like that after Titanic was Avatar.

 

Are folks really still trying to paint TPM as some sort of financial disappointment? Cause it did what it did without inflation or 3D ticket prices. Titanic was a monster that people thought had a record that would never be broken. Star Wars appealed to children and the older geek crowd, before it was cool to be a geek. Titanic appealed to everyone else (see: the larger audience).

 

By tickets in NA since ANH it was in descending order E.T., Titanic, TFA, TESB, Avatar, ROTJ, Jurassic Park, TPM, Raiders, Jurassic World.

So good company from that perspective.

 

But JP made only 14 million less than TPM and that was a movie about dinosaurs, a great one btw <3
Adjusted for inflation JP made even more money than TPM.

And it clearly wasn't a financial disappointment (god forbid), but in retrospective I thought it could have done better.

 

JP still appealed to kids (I remember, I was one at the time ), so it's no shock that it's gross and TPM's were so close.

I think the fan base is a bit larger, especially since the prequels, TCW and TFA all brought in new fans, but it's also "cooler" to be in to nerdy things now. Not so in 1999.

Really, nobody can effectively explain Titanic. Even George Lucas said no one would beat it while he was filming TPM. It happened, but after years of inflation.

 

Isn't it crazy how that works out? I went from thinking he got parts based purely on his looks, and now if I see he's in a movie, I'm like, "Dude...Leo's in it. I gotta see it." One of my favorite actors.

 

Pre-release hype is one thing. I think that it's fair to say that Titanic (and Jurassic Park as well, since it was mentioned) surpassed expectations more than The Phantom Menace did.

The wider-audience angle? There's something to that, but only as a partial explanation, since Star Wars films have consistently been among the highest-grossing of all time. They're not exactly niche.

 

Frankly, the answer is that James Cameron managed to capture lightning in a bottle, much like George Lucas did with the original STAR WARS. Like the original STAR WARS, TITANIC was a classic tale that pretty much everyone could understand and most could relate to. Yes, the love story in TITANIC was definitely a bit cheesy, trite and formulaic, but it obviously worked for many people. Like STAR WARS, it struck a resonant chord with the entire world and I think the simplicity of the story actually helped it. The original STAR WARS was a simple adventure tale of a young farmboy who becomes a heroic knight, rescues a princess and defeats an Evil Empire. TITANIC was a simple story about star-crossed lovers transcending class barriers to be together and how nothing could come between them. Pretty much everyone can relate to both of these.

By contrast, THE PHANTOM MENACE is pretty damn weird. It’s a convoluted political drama involving taxation, trade routes, and how the titular Phantom Menace manipulates everyone on his rise to power, but at the same time, it’s told in a very childish and juvenile manner, with an obnoxious cartoon sidekick guaranteed to annoy the hell outta everyone over the age of 8 and an overly cutesy kid protagonist who falls squarely in the “plucky child prodigy/genius” cliché that everyone was sick and tired of by 1999. Obviously, it still made a boatload of money but a film like this was never going to have the monumental success that the first STAR WARS and TITANIC had had…even if it had been good.

Also, I actually saw TITANIC on its opening day, so my initial opinion of it wasn’t shaped by the massive hype and oversaturation that surrounded the movie, and I remember thinking that it was a genuinely great movie. It truly did feel like a grand, glorious, larger-than-life Hollywood epic, both in its spectacle and in its emotional core. The real problem with the movie, I think, is that everybody just got sick of it. I still consider it a great movie, although I have to admit that the insane level of hysteria surrounding it dulled my enthusiasm quite a bit.

 

I don't think that adults then (or now) were that familiar with what the characters looked like, or the exact detail of the ship, that it encouraged a record number of movie goers to see it.

Leo and Kate were hyped like golden age couples, Bogey and Bergman, for example. In the UK and in other countries, Kate Winslet was called "England's Rose" (geddit?) and at the time, Princess Diana had just died. She too had been referred to as England's rose. (bleeeuch!!!)

There were a lot of mature and middle aged cinema goers who ordinarily would never see a movie more than once in the cinema, going to see it over and over because of its "classic" love story played out against a historic spectacle.

 

I personally found Titanic was ridiculously over-hyped, especially the "love story", which IMHO sucked to be honest. General audiences will probably always be lured by disaster movies, then throw in a love story to make the whole thing so "tragic" and you are sure to have (maybe mostly female?) audiences having crying fits over how "romantic" it all is and standing in line to see it again day after day. Also it had DiCaprio to draw audiences, already a star since Romeo + Juliet. Who did TPM have in its cast except that guy who was in Trainspotting, a movie that appealed to only a VERY limited audience. SW had so much less appeal to general audiences but had a loyal hard-core fan base, not enough to beat the general audience appeal. In the late 90s SW really had pretty much disappeared from mainstream interest, despite the special editions, let's face it. So then this extremely "tragic" and "romantic" drama comes along, which one do you expect more people to fall for? Naturally it was Titanic! Titanic even had that song you heard pretty much EVERYWHERE no matter where in the world. Anytime from 1998 till about 2001 it was practically impossible to escape that Celine Dion song. So here is your answer, Titanic was massively over-hyped, while TPM also was but to a much lesser extent.
Apart from all the hype though, I have to admit that I did enjoy Titanic, even the equally "cheesy" Pearl Harbor, though that one was much less hyped.

 

You have some good points, but I don't agree with the bolded part. I don't think that Star Wars was as massive outside the US as Titanic - which is supported by the box office numbers, either because Star Wars appealed (& appeals) more to the Americans or because the "Overseas" market wasn't as big as it was 20 years later.

I'd say that my theory is supported in part by the performance of TFA. While HUGE, it still generated roughly 1/2 of its total box office in the US. Both Titanic and Avatar generated only about a third of their BO in the US. And being from Europe and speaking from experience, I can confidently say that Avatar and Titanic were much more popular than any of the prequels & TFA.

 

"Titanic" touched a nerve. Much like the original SW movie did, 20 years before. (Ironically, ANH had reclaimed its "Top Grossing Movie of All Time" status from "E.T." earlier in 1997 because of the huge success of the SE release, only to see "Titanic" swipe that title only months later. Lucas was gracious about it, though: he took out a full page ad in, I think, Variety -- or maybe it was the Hollywood Reporter -- to congratulate James Cameron.) No one could have predicted it. You could call it a freak occurrence.

I was caught up in "Titanic" fever myself that year; said fever has reduced considerably over the years, although I still enjoy the movie. I do, however, find myself fast-forwarding through most of the Jack/Rose scenes, because I find the "love story" the least-compelling thing about the movie, and rather boring, to be honest. I also think that Leo and Kate, fine actors on many other occasions, give weak performances.

 

I was just crunching the numbers and you are right. Adjusted for inflation, the original STAR WARS managed to gross $2,589,469,748 worldwide. TITANIC grossed $3,893,203,322. Now that I think about it, I’m not sure any film has ever outgrossed TITANIC- including GONE WITH THE WIND and AVATAR. By contrast, THE PHANTOM MENACE grossed $1,690,907,792 once you adjust for inflation. That’s pretty damn good, but it’s just not in the same ballpark as TITANIC, GONE WITH THE WIND, AVATAR, or STAR WARS. Even THE FORCE AWAKENS managed to do better, grossing $2,068,223,624 worldwide.

Still, I’m also willing to bet that STAR WARS is among the Top 5 highest-grossing films worldwide once you adjust for inflation, so my claim of it being a gigantic success the world over has some merit, I think.

 

That's my contention as well. I'm in no way an authority on this matter, but last year I compiled some data and wrote an article about it. You can find it here if you're interested.

 

There is no such thing as a worldwide total adjusted for inflation. Not only do many countries not even have proper data up until fairly recently, but the development of markets was also completely different. Some grew, some became smaller, some exploded onto the scene, etc. To top things off, you have to deal with exchange rates, which can make all the difference. Compare Avatar and TFA, about 400m of the difference between the two comes from much worse exchange rates for TFA. Titanic actually had much worse exchange rates than that, which, when combined with the huge boost Avatar got from 3D-prices, explains why Avatar is no.1 worldwide even though Titanic had a bigger audience almost everywhere.

To get a proper adjustment, you'd have to take a look at each individual market, adjust the total based on local currency or admissions and then set one specific exchange rate that acts as a mark for all movies, which is basically impossible, because you are dealing with plenty of different currencies.

 

That number for titanic is a bit high isnt it ?


This seems more legit.

 

Oissan It's an approximation, not a cold hard number. I simply took its inflation-adjusted domestic gross and then divided it by what percentage of its gross came from North America to come up with those numbers. If you can't accurately adjust worldwide gross for inflation, then it’s a pretty useless metric when you’re trying to compare films that came out during different time periods. (I.e., you can’t directly compare the worldwide gross of the original trilogy and the prequel trilogy while just ignoring inflation.)

fastcooljosh You’re probably right about that. Still, it does show that the four films I named (GONE WITH THE WIND, STAR WARS, AVATAR, TITANIC) did significantly outgross THE PHANTOM MENACE.

 

TPM also had a very poor word of mouth, which didn't give it the Box Office legs it should have had.

Still my favorite prequel, though.