"Titanic is not a disaster epic or an action film. Call it a love story or a $190m art film, whatever, but Titanic is not a road map to the future. It's meant to be a singular picture." That's James Cameron, in the critic Tom Shone's book Blockbuster, and Jim was dead right. His film might look now like the ice-breaker for Hollywood's next decade, ploughing the way for the convoy of $200m+, special-effects-powered behemoths that followed, but it was the end of something, too: Titanic marked the death of the event movie.

It was the ultimate event: the stage set by gleeful press rubber-necking amid accusations of hubris; the cloud of schadenfreude clearing up to reveal the blazing hype that let Titanic go, in Shone's words, "demographic-diving... Down through the teenage boys, down into the substratum of teenage girls, and from there, it burrowed further down to their mothers". Its final worldwide gross – $1.84bn – was monstrous, far in excess of any previous film on inflation-unadjusted charts (and this week's 3D release will top that up). Singular seems like the only appropriate word.

But everything that came in its wake was aiming to have the same impact. Titanic arrived just as Hollywood's profit-centre was switching from US domestic to the overseas market, and it was the most dramatic demonstration yet of what a sustained global haul could achieve (it did just over two-thirds of its business outside America, a high figure for 1997). The studios readjusted accordingly, and upped the pace: in the noughties, the $900m-grossing blockbuster became the norm, with the built-in safety net of vast marketing budgets and franchises that locked in audiences. By the middle of the decade, Fox chairman Bill Mechanic was moaning that the market couldn't support 12 blockbusters a year; by 2007, the number was nearer 20. The event movie, in short, had stopped being an event.

Believe or not, it wasn't like that prior to the good ship Cameron's voyage into the mists of schmaltz. Event movies of the 90s – the real phenomena, not just the self-proclaimed ones – stood out because they outperformed the rest of the market by some clear distance. By that measure, Terminator 2, Jurassic Park, The Lion King, Independence Day, perhaps Ghost qualify. In the noughties, the first Harry Potter, second Pirates of the Caribbean and the third Lord of the Rings posted gold-star grosses, but they only stood a couple of extra inches above the sea of global blockbusters and the proliferating products of the animation factories that were their peers.

Perhaps these mega-franchises exerted more cultural gravity – another measure of the event movie – than the 90s crop. But spread out over three, four, five films, stretched over half a decade or more, somehow they seemed less events than smeared, sprawling culture-trope circuses with reassuring faces – Harry, Hermione, Peter Parker, Jack Sparrow – guiding us through whatever "personal journey" was at hand.

Avatar, in 2009, was really the one indisputable event movie of the noughties, qualifying both in terms of cultural impact and stupendous box office. But how singular can you really be when singularity has become your selling point? There was something predestined about things for Cameron this time, no tantalising possibility of failure, which runs counter to the notion of the event, which should at least appear to have some element of spontaneity or chaos to it. The ship – the blockbuster – was still on course; the iceberg – the event – had melted.

• Titanic 3D is out on Friday