James Cameron’s Titanic continues to be one of the most impressive cinematic achievements, and while it was met with a lot of praise, it also got Cameron in trouble, and he was sued over it. James Cameron has become one of the most successful filmmakers in the industry and his name is now synonymous with big-budget productions, mostly in the sci-fi genre. However, one of his most ambitious projects was far from the world of sci-fi: Titanic, a disaster drama movie released in 1997.
Although Titanic is based on the real-life tragedy of the RMS Titanic in 1912, it tells a fictional story led by fictional characters, though there are also many characters based on real-life passengers of the ship. Titanic follows Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet), a young woman and first-class passenger, and Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio), a third-class passenger who won his ticket on a lucky game of poker. Over the course of four days, Rose and Jack met, got to know each other, fell in love, and defended their romance from those who looked down upon them. Unfortunately, Rose and Jack’s romance was meant to be tragic, and even though they did their best to stay together and safe while the ship sank, Rose survived and Jack became one of the many victims of the Titanic.
Titanic became the most expensive movie ever made at the time and kept the #1 spot as the highest-grossing movie of all time for many, many years, but it wasn’t safe from controversy, and Cameron was sued over Titanic by a man who claimed Cameron stole the movie’s story.
What Happened With The Titanic Lawsuit
The Titanic lawsuit happened 20 years after the movie’s release, which only makes the situation even weirder. It was reported back in 2017 that a man named Stephen Cummings was suing James Cameron over Titanic, arguing that Cameron stole his and his family’s story to build those of Rose and Jack. According to Cummings, who was an ex-”yacht master”, Cameron heard about him via word of mouth in the late 1980s, and those stories are what led the filmmaker to come up with the character of Jack Dawson, though what could have happened in Cummings’ life to serve as the base for Jack Dawson is unknown. Cummings also claimed that he had relatives who were on board the Titanic on that fateful night in 1912, and their story was used to create that of Rose and Jack. Again, details about the story of Cummings’ relatives onboard the Titanic are unknown, but they were a wife, who survived, and a husband, who died when the ship sank. Cummings was suing Cameron for $300 million for “stealing” his personal stories and also sought 1% of the movie’s royalties.
It’s unknown what happened to Stephen Cummings and his lawsuit against James Cameron, but it’s easy to see why it wouldn’t have gone far. The lawsuit arrived two decades after the release of Titanic, and proving that Cameron heard his stories from someone else and used that to write the main characters of his movie would have been extremely difficult. In addition to that, Cummings’ relatives obviously weren’t the only married couple on board the ship whose relationship had a tragic end, so that would have also been hard to prove. That was not the only problem James Cameron came across thanks to Titanic, as the family of one of his characters, Will Murdoch, who was a real-life member of the ship’s crew, were deeply offended by how he was portrayed. Titanic obviously took various elements from the real-life ship, its tragedy, and its passengers, but at the end of the day, it tells a fictional story starring two fictional characters.