Titanic is an epic American motion picture based on the real-life sinking of the British ocean liner Titanic in April 1912. The ship was sailing from Southampton , England, to New York City , New York, on its first voyage. It sank after striking an iceberg , and an estimated 1,500 passengers and crew perished. 
The Titanic was advertised as the greatest passenger ship ever built and considered “unsinkable.” Yet the ship broke apart and sank in the icy waters of the North Atlantic Ocean only 2 1/2 hours after it struck the iceberg. Its loss at sea shocked the world and has made the Titanic a legend in the popular imagination.
Released in 1997, the movie Titanic was written, directed, and co-produced by the Canadian-born filmmaker James Cameron . Cameron used the latest technical methods to achieve the film’s many special effects. There are more than 150 actors, playing both fictional and real-life characters, in Titanic. Thousands of behind-the-scenes contributors also helped make the film.
Titanic is more than three hours long. It first shows life aboard the vessel before the ship strikes the iceberg. Then the film dramatically portrays the confusion, panic, disbelief, and acts of both bravery and cowardice among the 2,205 passengers and crew as the ship goes down.
Titanic is a romance as well as a disaster movie. It is narrated 84 years after the ship sank by the fictional character Rose DeWitt Bukater, who was 17 years old when the Titanic began its fatal voyage. Rose was a member of a socially prominent Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, family traveling first-class on the ship. Early in the voyage, Rose becomes friends with Jack Dawson, a struggling American artist from the third-class section of the ship. Their friendship develops into a love affair that ends tragically when the Titanic sinks. Rose survives, but Jack dies in the freezing ocean. The English actress Kate Winslet played the teenage Rose. The American actor Leonardo DiCaprio played Jack.
Costing $200 million, Titanic was the most expensive film made up to that time. It earned more than $2 billion, a record that was broken by another James Cameron film, Avatar, in 2009. Titanic was nominated for 14 Academy Awards . It won 11, tying the record set by Ben Hur in 1959. The song “My Heart Will Go On,” sung by Céline Dion on the Titanic soundtrack, won the Academy Award for best original song.
