WTF: Australian Titanic Enthusiast Plans To One-Up James Cameron With New Film

It's a potent cocktail: money mixed liberally with delusions of grandeur. Recall, if you will, the name Clive Palmer. He's the billionaire in Australia (at current conversion rates there's not even a need to qualify him as a billionaire only in Australian dollars) who last year announced his plans to build a full-size, working Titanic replica of his very own. That announcement was followed by a report that Palmer was talking to sheep-cloning scientists with the idea of building his own Jurassic Park.

Palmer denied the JP report, and as far as commercial ideas go, the notion of a working Titanic replica is actually genius. He says he's lined up thousands of people interested in a Titanic II voyage, and I believe it. It's an expensive venture, and one loaded with serious risk — against capricious fate, if nothing else — but one which could make money.

Here's where the crazy kicks in: now Palmer says he's going to make two Titanic films. One will be a documentary about building the ship, which makes sense. The other is a dramatic film that he claims "should be a lot better movie" than Cameron's Titanic.

The Herald Sun in Australia (via The Playlist) reports Palmer's intentions, quoting him saying,

[The film] will be about its first voyage and some of the things that happen on it... It's a fictional movie, but we're also doing a documentary about the building of Titanic II at the moment, there's film crews working on that.

Palmer says the story, like Cameron's film, will have "some love in it", but that "it should be a lot better movie than that."

He also threw out some pretty standard pre-production quotes: "I think it will be, the script's looking pretty good at the moment – it's not finished but it's very interesting.... We've got a number of people wanting to join and a number of production companies wanting to work with us, but we're still working on the script."

I can't wait to see how this turns out; I pray that both films (and the ship) get made. Can someone put Palmer together with the Atlas Shrugged people, so they can all just make one big movie together?