Titanic II will set sail in 2022 – thankfully there will be no icebergs left for it to hit

If you looked up the phrase ‘tempting fate’ in a dictionary, you’d probably find a full paragraph on the upcoming voyage of ‘Titanic II’.

Copying the name of a seemingly indestructible ship on which more than 1,500 people died is bad enough, but the folks planning on sending a fully-functioning replica of that ship out into open water want to copy absolutely everything about the original Titanic other than the crash and death part of its maiden voyage.

Thankfully for iceberg-haters, a category which seems to only comprise people making a Titanic replica, the world might be dying quickly enough that there are none of the things left by 2022.

However, if Titanic II wants history to repeat itself it’s setting out about it the right way.

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The approach is less tempting fate and more injecting the concept of fate into the mind of an angry bull and brandishing a red flag in its general direction, but maybe that’s appropriate given the too-big-to-fail narrative around the original Titanic.

As USA Today reports, the new $500m ship will hold 2,400 passengers and 900 crew – close to the numbers held by the original before that whole inconvenient iceberg thing.

And, to make matters worse, after travelling from Dubai to Southampton it’ll then retrace almost the exact route which led directly to 1,500 people dying.

“After its maiden voyage, the Titanic II will embark on other global routes,” according to reports, which feels pretty presumptuous given what came before.

Blue Star Line, the shipping company behind the Titanic II project, have at least made one notable change from the original – they’re stepping up safety measures, which means loads and loads of lifeboats in case the unthinkable happens.

Perhaps it’s worth bearing in mind that a flawless, uncontroversial journey from point A to point B probably wouldn’t make as good a film as James Cameron’s Oscar-winning Titanic, though a low-budget Titanic II film was made in Australia and released in 2010.

Let’s just see what that one’s about, by checking out Rotten Tomatoes’ synopsis of the disaster movie:

“The passengers on the Titanic II discover that history has a habit of repeating itself when they step aboard the state-of-the-art, luxury ocean liner, and set sail on the same course as the ship’s doomed predecessor.”

Oh no.

(Images: YouTube/Getty)