"Titanic" re-screened today, were you in the cinema 25 years ago?

The "flying" scene of Rose stretching out her arms and hugging Jack at the bow of the boat is not only a classic shot in film history, but also a common pose when couples take photos for more than 20 years. At the end of 1997, the $200 million production of "Titanic" was released in the United States, and it received $28 million at the box office in three days of release, and the cinema was packed with excited audiences from 8 a.m. to midnight at 3:30 a.m. After the Spring Festival the following year, Chinese audiences were still discussing the fate of Zhao Benshan's fish pond and the township chief Fan Wei, and the super masterpiece "Titanic" entered the mainland market with a bang. April 3, 1998 became a memorable day in the hearts of Chinese fans.

The "Titanic" craze quickly swept the world, repeatedly setting records, becoming the first film to grossing $1 billion at the global box office, and winning the weekend box office in North America for 15 weeks. To this day, the film still ranks fourth in global film history with a total box office of 2.256 billion US dollars. "Titanic" also swept the Academy Awards that year, winning 11 awards including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Cinematography, Best Editing, Best Visual Effects, and Best Original Song, becoming one of the three films in history that won the most Academy Awards. Whether in terms of box office results or artistic achievements, "Titanic" is an unprecedented milestone in global film history.

Probably no movie has such enduring charm. 25 years later, on April 3, the "25th Anniversary Re-screening" of "Titanic" returned to the Chinese big screen, and will be logged into the All-China Art Federation special line with a new 3D remastered version, and will be logged into major theaters in mainland China in CINITY/IMAX/Dolby Vision/China Giant Screen formats. Will you still go to the theater to revisit the film?

It is clear that both can live!

Can Jack and Rose really only live one? This is not just a problem that plagues Chinese audiences. In February, techno-controllable perfectionist Cameron and National Geographic collaborated on a documentary called "Following James Cameron on the Titanic 25 Years Later" to build momentum for the 25th anniversary rescreening, the highlight of which was to clarify the question that audiences had been arguing about for 25 years.

Cameron teamed up with several scientists to find two stand-ins who were basically similar in stature, weight and actor Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, conducted multiple sets of experiments, and finally concluded that as long as both of them can keep their upper bodies lying on the board, they should be rescued, even if Jack may be physically exhausted, but if Rose can take off her life jacket and give it to Jack to wear, it can help him hold out for a few hours until help comes. In other words, it is clear that both of them can live!

"But there may be many variables in the process." Cameron explained, "Jack's idea is to keep Rose safe first and not do anything that could harm her, so he should not accept Rose's life jacket, which is very much in line with his character." Of course, Cameron also admitted that if he had known the results of such an experiment, he could have processed the board a little smaller, so small that it could not accommodate two people, so that he could fill in the possible bugs in the plot.

This should be considered a hundred secrets, that year, Cameron spent five years to shoot this movie. To get a satisfying picture, Cameron and his special effects team flew aboard the miniature reconnaissance submarine Mir, carrying two deep-sea exploration robots on board, and dived into the deep sea 12 times. Subsequently, Cameron found the shipyard of the original Titanic and imitated the right half of a 1-to-1 size Titanic, and in the actual shooting, Cameron used props in the opposite direction of the text to shoot, and then flipped the mirror image to achieve the scene shooting on the left half of the cruise ship. Such a whimsical idea saved the crew millions of dollars in prop funds, Cameron turned his head, took the saved funds, and made a shot overlooking the entire Titanic, which required the most advanced computer CG technology at the time, and finally spent $1 million, this shot is only 10 seconds.

While pushing CG technology to new heights, Cameron also began to use motion capture technology on a large scale to bring all the characters on the giant ship to life. In the first decade of this century after "Titanic", the technology pioneered by it began to really become popular.

The "tech maniac" eventually set the technological benchmark for the film industry, but Cameron's films were more than just technology. The rich girl and the poor painter only took a few days from the occurrence of love to the parting of life and death, tragedy made love immortal, and love also gave disaster films a tragic romantic color. When the cruise ship is about to sink, many people choose to die with dignity, gracefully and without losing measure: several performers on the ship insist on their jobs, playing one song after another, mothers who have no time to escape comfort their young children, old couples who have been with each other all their lives choose to die in arms, and the captain stays in the wheelhouse until the last moment... Love and freedom, fame and wealth, disaster and humanity, a "Titanic" covers all kinds of things in the world.

Sha Dan, a film curator and film history researcher at the China Film Archive, told China Newsweek that the greatest value of "Titanic" is to let us see how technology and humanistic spirit in a good movie are highly balanced in the film narrative and picture, "it has no shortcomings." In Shadan's view, such a high balance has rarely been able to truly surpass "Titanic" to this day, which seems to show that film is not actually an evolutionary art.

In the end, the $294 million, record-setting classic soon became the highest-grossing film of all time, a title that held for more than a decade, until the release of "Avatar" in 2009, Cameron broke his own box office record himself. "Titanic" has also made the two actors who play the male and female protagonists, becoming their most important masterpieces, and last year, Cameron recalled when promoting "Avatar 2" that the reason why the male protagonist chose Leonardo, who was not very famous at the time, was because he was too handsome. "When he interviewed, the girls of the whole building crowded over, even the accountant, just to look at him."

"Titanic" in China

In the spring of 1998, after the film was introduced to Chinese mainland, the auditorium was full, and it became the box office champion in Chinese film history that year, and held this record for 11 years. Sha Dan, a film curator and film history researcher at the China Film Archive, who was just in high school, remembers the shock he received in the cinema: "At that time, I felt that the cinema was surprisingly quiet, as if something had hit people's eyes and hearts. "The film is 3 hours and 15 minutes long, the first time a Chinese audience has seen a film of this size. Shadan felt that it didn't feel like it was so long in the cinema at that time, because he was "completely attracted and wrapped in the plot of the movie." With the kind of sluggishness in the movie, whether it is the picture, the performance, the plot, the music... It was very immersive, and I learned for the first time what a real super blockbuster is. ”

That year, regardless of whether he knew the English Chinese, he would hum a few words of "My Heart Eternal": "My heart will go on and on..." Even at the 1999 CCTV Spring Festival Gala, Zhao Lirong sang this song in the sketch "Veteran Out of the Horse" with Gong Hanlin, which was also her last Spring Festival Gala appearance. As for the action of Rose and Jack hugging at the bow of the boat, it has become a timeless image and is constantly imitated.

In 1998, when the average ticket price of movies was only 15 yuan, the ticket price of "Titanic" was between 25-30 yuan, and some theaters in Guangzhou even priced 50 yuan, but people still came to admire. Some cinemas show 6 shows a day, almost 24 hours a day. Many viewers still treasure the ticket stubs of that year and are reluctant to throw them away.

This wave of movie-watching enabled "Titanic" to achieve a box office of 360 million yuan in the mainland, accounting for a quarter of the national box office in 1998, and topped the box office champion in Chinese film history at that time, only to be broken by the 455 million box office of "Transformers 2" in 2009. Since then, Hollywood has paid more and more attention to the Chinese mainland film market.

This year's re-screening is actually the third time that "Titanic" has met Chinese mainland audience. In 2012, the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, the film was converted into a 3D version and re-released, and took 946 million yuan from the pockets of a new generation of audiences, and received a super high evaluation of 9.5 points for Douban movies. After this re-screening in 2012, the global box office of "Titanic" also soared to 2.256 billion US dollars, ranking second in the global box office list.

In 2018, to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the release of "Titanic", the 8th Beijing International Film Festival held a special screening, and all 6 screenings of 2241 tickets were sold out in just 12 seconds.

Many people are looking forward to whether the box office, which has temporarily fallen into a cold box office after the Spring Festival, will be ignited by "Titanic" again. As of March 2023, "Titanic", which slipped to No. 4 in the global box office rankings, temporarily ranks after "Avatar", "Avengers 4" and "Avatar 2", and with the third release of "Titanic", its ranking is likely to move forward again with the support of Chinese fans.

Shadan feels that for a new generation of young audiences, the re-screening of "Titanic" is a new film, and when today's Hollywood films gradually only have some technology and routines, perhaps these young audiences can get some shock and emotion from "Titanic" like the audience of that year.

Reporter: Li Jing