Terreur sur le Britannic (1974) was shot mainly aboard a real ocean liner. The Hamburg had recently been sold by its German owners to the Soviet Union. Before the Soviets took delivery of the liner, they rented it to the movie company. The liner was painted in the livery of a fictional shipping line, very similar to the livery used by the Soviet Morpasflot line, and renamed the "Britannic." Advertisements were run in British papers, soliciting extras who would take a lengthy cruise in the North Sea for free, but with the knowledge that the ship would actually seek out the worst possible weather, as the story demanded seas too rough for the lifeboats to be lowered, trapping the passengers on board.
They received 2,500 applicants and had to select 250. Weather was bad; Sir Ian Holm did not go on location but says he heard "reports of horrible storms off Iceland and everybody getting drunk to deal with it. The story was the bar closed only between seven and seven-thirty in the morning."
They received 2,500 applicants and had to select 250. Weather was bad; Sir Ian Holm did not go on location but says he heard "reports of horrible storms off Iceland and everybody getting drunk to deal with it. The story was the bar closed only between seven and seven-thirty in the morning."
Terreur sur le Britannic (1974) took its inspiration from an incident which occurred in 1972, when a man claimed he had planted a bomb on-board the Queen Elizabeth 2, and demanded a ransom. Cunard were prepared to pay the ransom, but the British Government decided instead to send in Royal Marine commandos (one SAS, two from the Special Boat Squadron and a Welsh bomb disposal expert of the Royal Army Ordnance Corps), who parachuted into the North Atlantic 1,000 miles from the U.K., and boarded the Queen Elizabeth 2 to search for the device. The threat turned out to be a hoax, and the F.B.I. later caught the culprit.
Terreur sur le Britannic (1974) is often considered a flop but it actually did quite well in the U.K., Europe, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. However, it failed to set the U.S. box office alight due to inaccurate marketing as an action film and was thus considered a failure.
In November 1975, the year after the movie's release, two bombs were exploded on the ocean liner on which Juggernaut was filmed, the T.S. Maxim Gorkiy, while it was berthed in San Juan, Puerto Rico, but they did not sink the ship, and she was later repaired.