Cameron’s fanatic attention to historic detail is threatening to turn into a disaster of its own. Last week he grudgingly admitted he can’t finish “Titanic” in time for the Fourth of July, the biggest moviegoing weekend of the year. Despite round-the-clock work by 100 digital artists, the computer-generated imaging can’t be completed. Cameron suggested that Twentieth Century Fox and Paramount, partners in this project, reschedule the release for August, but it could be pushed back as far as Christmas.
Ever since “The Abyss” and “True Lies,” movies beset by budget overruns and schedule delays, Cameron’s obsessive perfectionism has been well known. In fact, complete control is written into his deal. On “Titanic,” he is re-creating the disaster down to details as small as the pattern on the dinnerware. When the camera swoops down on the Titanic steaming out of port, smoke billowing from its stacks, hundreds of people milling on the decks, a woman in a red dress bending down to tie her child’s hat in place, it’s as if the past has been yanked into the present–and it’s all computer-generated. A five-month shooting schedule stretched to seven months; a $120 million budget ballooned to nearly $200 million. Says one production executive, “No one has ever done this kind of photorealism on this scale before. We just didn’t know the magnitude, the difficulty of doing it.”
It’s not total insanity: the final hour of the film looks like it will deliver the white-knuckle action that is Cameron’s signature. Still, the delay will almost certainly hurt the movie’s fortunes. At the end of a summer crowded with special-effects spectacles like “The Lost World” and the $160 million “Speed 2,” even “Titanic” could seem a bit anticlimactic. And Christmas is a long way away.
