LOS ANGELES - Part saturnine elegy to doomed youth, part exaltation of the transcendent power of love, blockbuster disaster movie "Titanic" is delivering that sinking feeling to a whole new generation of fans.

Tuesday marks two decades since Rose vowed to Jack she'd "never let go" - before spectacularly reneging on her promise, sending her frozen-to-death paramour to a watery grave and leaving "Titaniacs" worldwide sobbing into their popcorn.

The anniversary has been celebrated with screenings across the United States, and audiences are still swooning over the young lovers played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet - now both Oscar winners and Hollywood A-listers.

"The Titanic story itself has a timeless quality. It seems to exist outside our daily lives. As this straight moral lesson, it's something that fascinates us," director James Cameron told fans at a Los Angeles screening to mark the milestone.

Winslet's love-struck socialite and DiCaprio's artistic drifter were fictionalized characters in a dramatization of the real-life sinking in 1912 of history's most famous ship after it hit an iceberg on its maiden voyage across the Atlantic.

The film, distributed by Paramount at home and Fox abroad, entered into movie history when it picked up 11 Oscars, including best picture and best director for Cameron.

With a worldwide gross of $2.2 billion, it was the most successful movie ever made until Cameron's "Avatar" (2009) took $2.8 billion at the box office.

At an intimidating 195 minutes, the movie can feel in parts as long as the voyage on which it is based, but it earned mostly glowing reviews, and the theme song "My Heart Will Go On" became a global success for Celine Dion.

Cameron, 63, says he sold the idea to Fox executives with "probably the shortest pitch for a major movie in Hollywood history."

"I whipped open this book and in the center is a beautiful double-truck spread right across both pages of a painting by Ken Marschall, the best artist of the subject of the Titanic," he recalled.

"It was a beautiful shot of the rocket going off and lighting up the ship, and lifeboats rowing away as it went down in the more sedate, quiet part of the sinking. I said, 'Romeo and Juliet on that.' Five words."

DiCaprio and Winslet - then 21 and 20, respectively - began filming in September 1996. The pair quickly became close friends, reuniting onscreen a decade later for Sam Mendes's fraught love story "Revolutionary Road."

The epic proportions of the $200 million production, with its 1,000 extras and crew of more than 800, can hardly be overstated.

Cameron had a full scale model of the ill-fated luxury liner constructed on 40 acres of Mexican waterfront bought by Fox, after receiving the blueprints from the original ship builder.

The movie opened with a domestic haul of $28.6 million and was expected to follow the normal pattern for blockbusters, dropping by 40-50 percent in its second weekend.

Instead, it made another $28 million, and $32 million on the third weekend, eventually securing the top spot for 15 consecutive weeks.

Experts theorized that the numbers were being boosted by groups of young teenage girls watching multiple times, but Cameron believes "Titanic" did so well because the love story appealed across generations. - AFP