It made over $2 billion at the global box office, picked up a record-equalling eleven Academy Awards and fast-tracked its leading actors into the Hollywood stratosphere. Unfortunately, given that both the titular vessel and the romantic male lead ended the movie in a watery grave, the prospect of a sequel to James Cameron’s Titanic has never gained serious traction.

But what if it did?

After all, not only is Titanic the second highest-grossing movie of all time, it’s the only movie in the worldwide top fifty that doesn’t have a sequel, is not a sequel itself and/or has no sequel currently in production. In today’s franchise-obsessed Hollywood, the only thing more unlikely than a Titanic sequel is the fact that nobody’s green-lit one yet.

With this in mind, we thought the ultimate romantic blockbuster would be the perfect starting point for this podcast. If Titanic were granted a sequel, a remake or a spin-off today, what might that movie look like?

First off, we set ourselves a few ground rules – for this movie and for the podcast in general.

• All of our sequels need to be produced in the present day.  Meaning our theoretical Titanic sequel could be set in any time period, but we’re working with Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio as the forty-something actors they are today, not the fresh-faced young stars they were twenty years ago.
• This also means that any actor who has unfortunately passed away since the release of the movie in question, is also dead in the reality of the sequel. This is bad news for fans of Gloria Stuart, although there’s still the option of resurrecting her via CGI, a’la Peter Cushing in Rogue One.
• Egregious retconning is allowed, but must be justified by the pitcher. If Jack Dawson is alive in this movie, we need to have at least a passable explanation for how that came about.
• If a plot hole is spotted by the co-host, the pitcher must justify it to the co-host’s satisfaction.
• A plot hole get out of jail free clause may be invoked on very sparing occasions, if the pitcher can cite a suitable director to style out said plot hole. We call this the Bay-Shyamalan ‘just go with it’ defence.
• We will not give spoiler warnings in this podcast. It’s about theoretical sequels. We will be discussing essential plot points of the original movie. Deal with it.

After establishing these ground rules, we spent this episode hammering out our ideas. You can hear the full brainstorm session by listening into the podcast, but in summary our ideas were as follows…

Harry’s Pitch | Titanic 2: A Stoner Comedy

John’s Pitch | Titanic 2: A Woman’s Heart

You can listen to our Titanic episode on iTunes, Stitcher, acast, Overcast, Pocket Casts or Player FM. If you can think of a better way to revive the Titanic franchise, let us know in the comments section below or via our Twitter or Facebook channels, and we might give you a shout-out on a future episode.