Titanic 3D opens April 6, 2012. But the romantic/disaster movie's poster (via moviefone.com) is already here, just in time for Valentine's Day. Directed by James Cameron, and starring youthful couple Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, following its late 1997 release Titanic went on to become the biggest box-office hit the universe had ever known — if you choose to ignore inflation, of course.
Paramount, 20th Century Fox, and Cameron's Lightstorm Entertainment have reportedly spent 60 weeks and $18 million on the Titanic's full restoration and 2D-to-3D conversion, which is more than double what the actual ship cost back in 1912. (Well, okay — if, once again, you choose to ignore that pesky thing called inflation.) Despite all that dough, the director-producer says the new Titanic is in "2.99D"; in other words, superior to the "2.4D" of most conversions though not exactly the 3D of, say, Avatar.
In early 1998, Titanic was nominated for a record-tying 14 Academy Awards. (Though seriously handicapped by a lack of special effects and killer icebergs, Joseph L. Mankiewicz's All About Eve somehow managed the same number of nominations back in 1950.) Eventually, Cameron's film won a total of 11 Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, another record-tying feat — this time with William Wyler's equally mammoth 1959 Ben-Hur. (In early 2004, another superproduction, Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, would tie with Titanic and Ben-Hur.)
Kate Winslet, veteran Gloria Stuart (The Invisible Man, The Old Dark House), and the makeup crew were the only Titanic nominees that failed to take home an Oscar statuette: Winslet lost to Helen Hunt in James L. Brooks' As Good As It Gets; Stuart lost to Kim Basinger in Curtis Hanson's L.A. Confidential; the Tommy Lee Jones-Will Smith movie Men in Black won for Best Makeup. Leonardo DiCaprio and James Cameron's screenplay, for their part, were not even nominated. Else, Titanic would have boasted a record-shattering 16 Oscar nods.
In addition to DiCaprio, Winslet, and Stuart, Titanic features Billy Zane, Kathy Bates (as "The Unsinkable Molly Brown"), Bill Paxton, Frances Fisher, Bernard Hill, David Warner, Victor Garber, Suzy Amis, Mark Lindsay Chapman, Jonathan Hyde, Danny Nucci, and Ioan Gruffudd.
