Netflix is no stranger to controversy, often giving platforms to divisive public figures or airing docuseries endorsing fringe views, and its upcoming documentary movie Titan could prove one of its most talked-about films this year.
We'd already heard some hints about Titan, but Netflix has newly announced a release date for the movie, and provided more pointers as to what it'll be about. It'll release on Wednesday, June 11, one week shy of two years to the day that the event took place.
Titan or to give it its full name Titan: The Oceangate Disaster, is about the 2023 destruction of the Titan submersible, which was taking five people down to the depths of the Atlantic Ocean in order to sight-see around the wreck of the Titanic. It's very likely that you followed this closely when it took place, as we all did.
When it happened, public discourse was divided on the events. Some were horrified by the loss of human life and the anticlimactic rescue, with clues suggesting early on in the search for the sub that it could have survived.
But others were quick to point out that the participants of the trip were all multimillionaires who were spending loads of money on the trip, and that a simultaneous loss of a migrant boat with hundreds of people feared dead was getting far less media coverage.
Netflix doesn't seem to be hiding from the controversy swirling around the Titan sub — would it ever — and instead seems to be diving deep into it.
According to Netflix's blog Tudum, the 110-minute documentary movie will focus on Stockton Rush, the CEO of Titan owners OceanGate, who was one of the sub's five inhabitants. It'll look at his attempts to become a billionaire through his underwater adventure company.
Given the nature of the topic and how social media discussions went down two years ago, it's inevitable that Titan will reignite these conversations. So it's all but guaranteed to be a divisive documentary no matter what side of the debate it comes down on itself.
It'll likely be the most divisive documentary to come to Netflix for quite a while, too. That's because the streamer's doc slate is mainly taken up with Trainwreck, a one-movie-per-week series of docs that looks at events from the headlines and dives into them in greater detail.
Having looked at the line-up, none of these are nearly as divisive as the Titan submersible implosion. The only near contender could be the streamer's upcoming doc about the British Grenfell Tower fire, expected to debut at some point in 2025.
I've rounded up some of Netflix's biggest upcoming documentaries here, and you can find the current best Netflix documentaries here.
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