There was already some amount of cultural awareness about the Titanic prior to the movie, after all they pretty much started making movies, plays, documentaries, etc. as soon as it happened and kept right on making them

It also got a pretty good bump in popularity when the wreck was found in the 80s

Even if the movie weren’t made, there’d probably be a pretty decent chunk of people who would know about it from the scene in Ghostbusters 2 if nothing else.

It probably wouldn’t be something that pretty much everyone knows about, and certainly not in the kind of detail we do now, but you’d probably still have a pretty good chance of people who’d at least know that it was a big passenger ship that sank.

It’s hard for me to be impartial about this though, I was in elementary school when the movie came out, prime age to learn how to play “my heart will go on” on the recorder in music class and to see that big brick of 2 VHS tapes for rent in blockbuster. To this day I actually haven’t seen it, but it’s hard for me to imagine a world that people don’t know about the Titanic because the movie was just so omnipresent in my formative years.

The statement is completely age dependent. Not too long ago(before the movie), it was pretty newsworthy any time the next group reported that they were trying to find it.

it was a topic at school for me.

It already was pretty famous in pop culture before the movie. I guess that’s one of the reasons how it got its budget approved.

It was popular in the 80s with references in Ghostbusters and Timebandits and that was easy to stretch on into the 90s.

What’s the timeline for when a fictional love story about 911 is acceptable?

The location of the wreck wasn’t found until 1985 and it was definitely still a popular disaster story to tell. I remember books about it in my elementary school library in the late 1980s alongside volcanos and dinosaurs.

I was going to give the example of the Carnival cruise ship that sank in the 2010s (I think) largely due to the captain’s incompetence[…]

That’s Costa Concordia. It received extra media attention and is mostly known due to the awful behavior of the captain who first directly caused the accident and then fled the ship before most of his passengers.

clearly youre not a child of the 80s… when they found the titanic it was a huge deal and was all over the media for years

anyone old enough to remember the 80s would know the titanic

Dear lord, no. That is not at all true. I am 51 and when I was a kid, the wreck of the Titanic hadn’t been found yet. People were still fascinated. I remeber watching a movie called Raise The Titanic, which in turn was based on a best selling book. Why do you think James Cameron was obsessed with the Titanic?

IMHO, that Eastland article’s last paragraph explains why people know about the Titanic. It was a bit glitzy boat full of important and influential rich folks. One of the world’s richest men died on that boat.

The Eastland was just a bunch of normal Joes. And just like today, the rich got much more attention.

Have you heard of the Olympus?

If you’re talking about the Titanic’s sister ship, it was the Olympic, not Olympus. There was also a third ship in the same class called the Britannic which was also sunk.

Before the movie came out, the Titanic was probably the only shipwreck I had ever heard of.

People may be forgetting about the Lusitania though.

There’s a reason “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic” is a saying and “rearranging the deck chairs on the Eastland Steamer” isn’t.

If you think the Eastland Steamer is a story you should check out the Cleveland Steamer.

Thought #2….maybe don’t.