To be honest, we would’ve gone to see both of these on the same opening day.
Tomorrow Never Dies was given the green light by production studio MGM based entirely off the massively popular reaction to the release of the GoldenEye trailer.
Not the movie of GoldenEye, the trailer.
Of course, it helped a lot that GoldenEye went on to be a massive commercial and critical success, revitalising the Bond franchise after Timothy Dalton’s dour (but, in hindsight, violently gritty) tenure.
MGM’s new owner wanted the follow-up to GoldenEye to be released right alongside the company’s public stock offering, which gave the film-makers a very specific window to get the movie out: December 1997.
This meant they had barely two years to get the movie written, made, advertised and released. The first casualty was GoldenEye’s director Martin Campbell; he was busy making The Mask of Zorro, but would eventually return to the Bond franchise to direct Casino Royale. Instead, they went with Roger Spottiswoode, who was “hot” off the release of what turned out to be one of Hollywood’s most elaborate pranks.
Then there was the script, which was based around the handover of Hong Kong from Great Britain to China in July 1997, but the entire script needed to be rewritten from scratch when it was noted that the December 1997 release would immediately date those events.
Filming began in January 1997 without a finished script, and even the title arrived by mistake: it was initially titled Tomorrow Never Lies, but due to a mix-up via typing and faxing, Tomorrow Never Dies arrived at the MGM folks’ desk, and they went with that one.
Despite all of this, none of it really seemed to matter. Bond movies were a sure thing again, and Tomorrow Never Dies was guaranteed to be a monster hit when it arrived in cinemas on 19 December, 1997.
Nothing could possibly get in its way…. right?
April 1997, nearly a full year into production, and just three months out from the planned release date, writer/director James Cameron announced that the special effects of his latest movie were too complicated and they’d need to delay its launch.
The budget had expanded to $200 million, making it the most expensive movie ever made at the time. Early test screenings were reportedly met with a “tepid” response from audiences. Everyone in Hollywood was bracing for one of the biggest commercial disasters of all time.
December 1997 was already pretty stacked with releases, including a new Spielberg movie (Amistad), a new Tarantino movie (Jackie Brown), a new Scorsese movie (Kundun) a sequel to a hit horror (Scream 2), and a bunch of potential Oscar-magnets (Good Will Hunting, As Good As It Gets, The Boxer).
So there was nothing else to do for the producers of Titanic except to put it up against Tomorrow Never Dies and hope for the best. And as we all know now… it worked out for everyone, except James Bond.
Of Pierce Brosnan’s four 007 outings, Tomorrow Never Dies was the only one not to top the box office charts on its week of release. It would go on to make $333 million worldwide (nearly $20 million less than GoldenEye), while Titanic went on to become the biggest box office hit of all time ($2.195 billion), until it was replaced by another James Cameron movie in 2010.
Titanic won 11 of the 14 Oscars it was nominated for, compared to Tomorrow Never Dies, which was left with zero wins from zero nominations.
In short, Hollywood learned a big lesson of this head-to-head: nothing is a sure-thing, either in terms of absolute hits or absolute misses.
Oh, and never bet against James Cameron.
Tomorrow Never Dies and Titanic are both available to rent on Google Play, Rakuten TV and the Sky Store.
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