Claim: Titanic was released in 1997 with an initial worldwide gross of over $1.84 billion.

Titanic is a 1997 American epic romance-disaster film directed , written , co-produced , and co-edited by James Cameron . A fictionalized account of the sinking of the RMS Titanic , it stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet as members of different social classes who fall in love aboard the ship during its ill-fated maiden voyage .   Cameron 's inspiration for the film came from his fascination with shipwrecks ; he felt a love story interspersed with the human loss would be essential to convey the emotional impact of the disaster . Production began in 1995 , when Cameron shot footage of the actual Titanic wreck . The modern scenes on the research vessel were shot on board the Akademik Mstislav Keldysh , which Cameron had used as a base when filming the wreck . Scale models , computer-generated imagery , and a reconstruction of the Titanic built at Playas de Rosarito in Baja California were used to re-create the sinking . The film was partially funded by Paramount Pictures and 20th Century Fox . It was the most expensive film made at that time , with an estimated budget of $ 200 million .   Upon its release on December 19 , 1997 , Titanic achieved critical and commercial success . Nominated for fourteen Academy Awards , it tied All About Eve -LRB- 1950 -RRB- for the most Oscar nominations , and won eleven , including the awards for Best Picture and Best Director , tying Ben Hur -LRB- 1959 -RRB- for the most Oscars won by a single film . With an initial worldwide gross of over $ 1.84 billion , Titanic was the first film to reach the billion-dollar mark . It remained the highest-grossing film of all time until Cameron 's 2009 film Avatar surpassed it in 2010 . A 3D version of Titanic , released on April 4 , 2012 to commemorate the centennial of the sinking , earned it an additional $ 343.6 million worldwide , pushing the film 's worldwide total to $ 2.18 billion . It became the second film to gross more than $ 2 billion worldwide -LRB- after Avatar -RRB- .