Streaming giant Netflix is being slammed for re-releasing James Cameron’s iconic film ‘Titanic’, just days after the Titan tourist submersible sank, killing all five onboard. As per The Hollywood Reporter, Netflix is bringing back the Oscar-winning 1997 film ‘Titanic’ to the streamer on July 1 in the US and Canada. The OTT platform’s decision has irked many social media users. This follows the deaths of five passengers on the submersible named Titan, which was diving 13,000 feet to view the shipwreck of the British passenger liner Titanic which had sunk in the North Atlantic Ocean in the year 1912. The passengers died in a ‘catastrophic implosion’, US Coast Guard authorities confirmed on Thursday (local time) last week, as per a CNN report.
“Anyone else find it f***ing terrifying that they ALREADY have a documentary of the Titanic sun on Netflix? It hasn’t even been a f***ing week bruh. Wtf. #setup,” a Twitter user wrote. “So Netflix was like “lets capitalize on this sub thing real quick…gone head and put TITANIC back in the rotation,” another one wrote.
After an extraordinary five-day international search operation near the site of the world’s most famous shipwreck, the tail cone and other debris of the submersible were found by a remotely operated vehicle about 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic on the ocean floor, many hundreds of miles east of Cape Cod in Massachusetts.
Passengers of the Titan – owned by OceanGate, the private US company that runs submersible tours to the Titanic – were confirmed to have died in the implosion, the US Coast Guard authorities said. The Washington Post cited experts to report that the company was operating in a legal gray area out at sea, where the American-made submersible was launched from a Canadian vessel into international waters.
A remotely operated vehicle found ‘five different major pieces of debris’ from the Titan submersible, according to Paul Hankins, the US Navy’s director of salvage operations and ocean engineering. The debris was ‘consistent with the catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber’ and, in turn, caused a catastrophic implosion, the expert is said to have stated to CNN.
The passengers included British businessman and adventurer Hamish Harding, Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood from a prominent Pakistani-origin business family, French diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet, and Stockton Rush, the CEO of OceanGate Expeditions, who was the pilot of the Titan submersible.
