There’s a reason why there haven’t been many attempts to make a new movie on the ill-fated Titanic since 1997 - it’s pretty hard to top what James Cameron did. But an Australian billionaire is not only going to try to one-up Cameron, but also build a full-scale replica of the ship.
According to Australia’s Herald Sun, Clive Palmer, who made his billions in mining, is going to revive Palmer Pictures, a company he claims his father founded in the 1920s. “He was a silent movie star, he made two films in Australia,” he said.
Palmer’s aim is to use Palmer Pictures to promote his Titanic II, a full-scale replica of the ocean liner that infamously hit an iceberg in 1912 and sank. Indiewire notes that he announced the project last spring and he plans on documenting the building process and is making a documentary. In addition, he’s also working on a fictional film set on the Titanic.
“It will be about its first voyage and some of the things that happen on it,” he said, noting that the script’s not completed yet. “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.”
The fictional movie will have “some love in it,” but he promises that it “should be a lot better movie than that.”
So who will be in this movie? Palmer wouldn’t say, but Slash Film notes that he did say, “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.”
It’s going to be really hard for Palmer to top Titanic, which is the second-highest grossing film of all time, after Cameron’s Avatar.