Hollywood has been facing accusations of creative bankruptcy for decades, with the mid-budget theatrical release all but dead as many of the industry’s biggest names take their projects to streaming so that they can retain creative control and the major studios placing their focus squarely on franchises, sequels, remakes and reboots designed to maximize box office profits.
There are very few movies that are deemed untouchable and immune from the possibility of ever being remade, and based on a new rumor, it appears as though James Cameron’s Titanic isn’t on that list. While this should be taken with a pretty hefty helping of salt, a new report claims that Paramount want to team up with Disney to remake the disaster epic.
As per Giant Freakin Robot, Paramount want to cash in on Titanic’s continued popularity by mounting a different version of Cameron’s story, rather than creating a new narrative based on the true-life sinking of the famous ship. With Disney having acquired a stake in the rights following their takeover of Fox, even if Paramount come up with a brilliant idea, they still can’t move forward without the Mouse House’s approval.
Titanic was a cultural behemoth when it hit theaters in 1997, becoming the highest-grossing movie in history and winning eleven Academy Awards from fourteen nominations, and following 2012’s 3D re-release it became just the second title to earn $2 billion at the box office and still ranks third on the all-time chart behind Avengers: Endgame and Cameron’s own Avatar.
While this seems like a bad idea on almost every imaginable level, Paramount are in dire need of sustained commercial success. Nine of their top twelve biggest hits ever hail from either the Shrek, Transformers or Mission: Impossible franchises, and two more in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and Titanic now fall under Disney’s purview, but surely there are a thousand better ideas than remaking a movie everybody already knows inside out, right?