Kurt Russell Helped Save James Cameron's Titanic From Bombing

The year was 1997, and the movie industry was lining up to bet against James Cameron for the third stupid time in a row.

Cameron is one of the most headstrong filmmakers of all time. He also possesses the annoying attribute of being a genius. This doesn't just go for his filmmaking talents; he's an autodidact who is well-read on a variety of topics. He knows a lot, knows he knows a lot, and knows Hollywood is rife with people who talk like they know a lot but know shockingly little – especially about the industry in which they work. This quality evokes petty resentment from the executives who hold the purse strings to his very expensive movies, so when they get into screaming matches over his budget overruns, they wind up hoping he'll fail because they hate having to stake their own jobs on Cameron's latest, house-breaking gamble.

After surviving the failure of "The Abyss" – still his best movie, but only if you're watching the theatrical cut — to hit commercial grand slams with the insanely pricey duo of "Terminator 2: Judgement Day" and "True Lies," Cameron earned the industry right to strut to the plate and take what was then the most expensive motion picture swing of all time with "Titanic." 20th Century Fox greenlit the film, but as the production hurtled over schedule, the studio hedged its bet by selling off the domestic distribution rights to Paramount.

Whether Fox made one of the worst business decisions in movie history is another story for another time. What mattered in the spring of 1997, when Paramount's marketing department was in charge of selling the movie, was that Cameron was now dealing with two major studios with frigid feet. And that's when Kurt Russell came to the rescue.

"Titanic" was initially slated for theatrical release on July 2, 1997. When Cameron told Paramount that he needed more time to tweak the visual FX, the studio was left with a gaping hole in its all-important summer release schedule. Paramount hoped to salvage its summer by releasing "Titanic" in August, but Cameron didn't feel comfortable enough to even test screen "Titanic" until mid-July of that year. The industry felt disaster was imminent until website Ain't It Cool News posted a raft of raves out of that Minneapolis test screening. Every review was ecstatic. There was scoffing amongst industry elites, but no one should've been surprised.

That's because earlier that year at ShoWest (the annual convention of the National Association of Theater Owners), Paramount had unveiled an unusually long 4-minute trailer (the studio had cut an action-heavy 90-second teaser, but producer Jon Landau persuaded them to sell the scale and romance). Exhibitors were thrilled with what they saw, but no one was more excited than Kurt Russell, who stepped up to the NATO stage and announced "I'd pay $10 just to see that trailer again").

Russell's response helped convince theater chains to run that 4-minute trailer in their multiplexes all summer. Audiences were stunned over and over again by the period detail and visual FX (most notably the final shot of the ship plunging into the sea). Though "Titanic" opened to a respectable, but hardly spectacular $29 million over the December 19, 1997 weekend, it remained the number one movie at the domestic box office until "Lost in Space" dethroned it in early April 1998. So if you're looking to generate a blockbuster out of a single theatrical trailer, run it by Kurt Russell first.