Are you looking for inspiration to plan your first cruise? Here’s my pick of the best movies set on a cruise ship, from Hollywood classics to a spectacular sci-fi and one film so bad it swept the Razzies.
Not all of these are masterpieces (although some are). But each showcases something of life on the high seas.
Some articles on this website contain affiliate links. This means that I may earn a small commission if you make a purchase through these links. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. Read the full disclosure here.
Classic Cruise Ship Movies
Now, Voyager (1942)
Not only one of the best movies set on a cruise ship, but one of my favourite films of all time. I blub like a baby every time I watch it.
Cowed by her domineering mother, neurotic Boston heiress Charlotte Vale (a stupendous Bette Davis) takes a cruise after a restorative stay in a sanatorium. On board, she falls in love with the married Jerry (Paul Henreid). The film is famous for the iconic scene where Henreid lights two cigarettes and hands one to Davis.
A masterpiece.
- Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes
- Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score: 91%
- Rotten Tomatoes audience score: 90%
- Available for streaming on Amazon Prime here.
An Affair to Remember (1957)
This melodrama, directed by Leo McCarey and starring Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr, is one of the most romantic films of all time.
Playboy Nickie (Grant) and Terry (Kerr) fall in love on a transatlantic cruise to New York. Despite being engaged to other people, they agree to meet in six months at the top of the Empire State Building. But will it all go to plan?
An Affair to Remember was introduced to a new generation of cinema-goers when it was featured in the 1993 movie Sleepless in Seattle.
- Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes
- Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score: 65%
- Rotten Tomatoes audience score: 87%
- Available for streaming on Amazon Prime here
Death on the Nile (1978)
Agatha Christie’s 1937 murder mystery has been adapted for the silver screen three times, but the original film version is the best of the bunch (steer well clear of Kenneth Branagh’s woeful 2022 remake).
Directed by John Guillermin, Death on the Nile was Peter Ustinov’s first appearance as Hercule Poirot and perhaps his best. Soon after Poirot boards a ship for a luxurious cruise down the Nile, a newlywed heiress is discovered murdered on board. Whodunnit?
- Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes
- Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score: 80%
- Rotten Tomatoes audience score: 79%
- Buy on Blu-Ray here
The Fifth Element (1997)
Welcome to a cruise ship of the future.
For my money, Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element is up there with the best science fiction movies of all time. Korben Dallas (Bruce Willis giving one of his finest performances) is a 23rd-century cab driver who is unwittingly pulled into a search for a mysterious fifth element that will prevent an apocalyptic event.
Much of the final act takes place aboard Fhloston Paradise, a space cruise ship patronised by the rich and powerful, complete with twelve swimming pools, high-end restaurants and a concert hall.
A glimpse of the future of cruising? Minus the giant fireball, obviously.
- Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes
- Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score: 71%
- Rotten Tomatoes audience score: 87%
- Available for streaming on Amazon Prime here
Disaster Movies Set on a Cruise Ship
The Poseidon Adventure (1972)
The 1970s loved a disaster movie with an all-star cast, and this is the best of them. The ageing SS Poseidon is on her final voyage from New York to Athens when a tsunami upends her on New Year’s Day. It’s then a race against time to get the survivors to safety.
Spoiler: not many passengers make it.
- Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes
- Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score: 81%
- Rotten Tomatoes audience score: 76%
- Available for streaming on Amazon Prime here
Titanic (1997)
The Oscar-winning, multi-nominated Titanic is one of the highest-grossing films of all time. Directed by James Cameron and starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio, this epic movie about one of the most famous cruise ships in history is also one of the most expensive movies ever made.
The sinking of the Titanic is viewed through the lens of a fictional relationship across the social divide between Rose (Winslet) and Jack (DiCaprio).
- Running time: 3 hours 15 minutes
- Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score: 88%
- Rotten Tomatoes audience score: 69%
- Available for streaming on Amazon Prime here
A Night to Remember (1958)
Despite Titanic’s many gongs, I far prefer this treatment of the sinking of the ill-fated cruise ship.
Filmed in a semi-documentary style, A Night to Remember sticks closely to the facts of the ship’s sinking, unimpeded by fictional subplots. This riveting film portrays the events of the fateful night of 15th April 1912 from the perspective of the luxury liner’s second officer, Charles Lightoller (Kenneth More).
- Running time: 2 hours 3 minutes
- Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score: 100%
- Rotten Tomatoes audience score: 91%
- Available for streaming on Amazon Prime here
Cruise Ship Movies to Make You Laugh
Monkey Business (1931)
Monkey Business was the Marx Brothers’ third feature comedy, and an absolute riot.
Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Zeppo play four stowaways crossing the Atlantic who end up working for a pair of feuding gangsters to evade the ship’s crew. After docking, the four of them become unlikely heroes.
- Running time: 1 hour 18 minutes
- Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score: 90%
- Rotten Tomatoes audience score: 84%
- Available on DVD from Amazon Prime here
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)
Shot in glorious Technicolor with a razor-sharp screenplay, this is one of the best musical comedies set at sea.
Showgirl Lorelei Lee (Marilyn Monroe) sails for Paris with her friend Dorothy (Jane Russell), where she plans to marry her wealthy beau. Her love of diamonds and the watchful eye of a private detective make things complicated.
- Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes
- Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score: 88%
- Rotten Tomatoes audience score: 83%
- Available for streaming on Amazon Prime here
Carry on Cruising (1962)
Carry on films are a guilty pleasure for me. Cinematic masterpieces they are not, but they are daft fun from a more innocent time. Carry on Cruising is very much in this mould.
Sid James plays Captain Wellington Crowther of the SS Happy Wanderer, forced to replace five absent crew members at short notice with the most incompetent shipmates ever to set foot on deck. The passengers are no picnic either.
- Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes
- Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score: N/A
- Rotten Tomatoes audience score: 50%
- Available for streaming on Amazon Prime here
Out to Sea (1997)
Out to Sea is not Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon’s finest cinematic outing by any stretch of the imagination, but it is harmless escapist fun.
Matthau’s character coaxes his widower brother-in-law (Lemmon) into working as dance hosts on a luxury cruise to hunt for wealthy women. Under the watchful eye of the cruise director (Brent Spiner, of Star Trek fame), romantic entanglements ensue.
- Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes
- Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score: 36%
- Rotten Tomatoes audience score: 52%
- Available for streaming on Amazon Prime here
The Parent Trap (1998)
This enjoyable rom-com is mostly set on land, but features scenes aboard Cunard’s Queen Elizabeth 2 (actually filmed on the Queen Mary, which is permanently docked in Long Beach, California). Lindsay Lohan plays identical twins who meet at summer camp and scheme to reunite their separated parents.
- Running time: 2 hours 7 minutes
- Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score: 87%
- Rotten Tomatoes audience score: 70%
- Available for streaming on Amazon Prime here
Like Father (2018)
In this predictable rom-com, jilted bride Rachel (Kristen Bell) ends up on her honeymoon Caribbean cruise with her estranged father, Harry (Kelsey Grammer).
Like Father is set aboard Royal Caribbean’s Harmony of the Seas, so lovingly filmed that it feels like an infomercial at times. Enjoyable if undemanding.
- Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes
- Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score: 48%
- Rotten Tomatoes audience score: 47%
- Available for streaming on Netflix
Musicals
Royal Wedding (1951)
Fred Astaire and Jane Powell play an American brother-and-sister song-and-dance team sailing to London for the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Philip Mountbatten. Love complicates things for both of them
- Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes
- Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score: 91%
- Rotten Tomatoes audience score: 69%
- Available for streaming on Amazon Prime here
Shall We Dance? (1937)
Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers performing to music by George and Ira Gershwin on a transatlantic crossing from Paris to New York. What more could you want?
Astaire plays a Russian ballet dancer and Rogers a musical-comedy star. Their agent leaks to the press that the two are married. Will the fiction become reality? The film features some of the greatest songs ever written, including They Can’t Take That Away From Me and Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off.
- Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes
- Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score: 89%
- Rotten Tomatoes audience score: 84%
- Available for streaming on Amazon Prime here
Romance on the High Seas (1948)
Starring Doris Day in her film debut and choreographed by Busby Berkeley, Romance on the High Seas is a farce with romantic misunderstandings at its heart.
Day plays a nightclub singer hired to impersonate a socialite on a cruise to Rio de Janeiro, allowing the real socialite to stay home and spy on her suspected unfaithful husband. It was filmed partly in Rio and Cartagena.
- Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes
- Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score: 88%
- Rotten Tomatoes audience score: 65%
- Available to buy on Blu-Ray here
Dramatic Ship Movies
Ship of Fools (1965)
This eclectic group of passengers on a cruise ship bound for pre-war Germany from Mexico represents a microcosm of 1930s society. Picking up eight Oscar nominations and directed by Stanley Kramer, Ship of Fools features a stellar ensemble cast including Vivien Leigh (in her final film role), Lee Marvin and George Segal.
Although the action takes place almost entirely on an ocean liner, the movie was filmed on a soundstage at Paramount Studios.
- Running time: 2 hours 29 minutes
- Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score: 63%
- Rotten Tomatoes audience score: 76%
- Available for streaming on Amazon Prime here
Table for Five (1983)
In this poignant melodrama, divorced father J.P. Tannen (Jon Voight) takes his three children on a Mediterranean cruise in an attempt to reconnect with them. However, he quickly realises that this is not that easy and is faced with an impossible decision when he learns of a tragedy back home.
Partly filmed on MS Vistafjord (built for the now defunct Norwegian American Line), shooting locations for Table for Five included Rome, Genoa, Haifa in Israel, Athens and Cairo and Alexandria in Egypt.
- Running time: 2 hours 2 minutes
- Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score: 67%
- Rotten Tomatoes audience score: 58%
- Not currently for streaming on Netflix or Amazon Prime, or to buy on DVD or Blu-Ray
The Worst Cruise Ship Movies Ever Made
Speed 2 Cruise Control (1997)
Keanu Reeves was wise to pass on this. Jason Patric stepped in opposite Sandra Bullock as they battle to save passengers on a Caribbean cruise from disaster.
The Seabourn Legend was rented for six weeks to film it. It’s a shame the script wasn’t given similar attention.
- Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes
- Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score: 4%
- Rotten Tomatoes audience score: 16%
- Available for streaming on Amazon Prime here
Jack and Jill (2011)
If you thought that Speed 2 Cruise Control was bad, this is the cinematic turkey to beat all cinematic turkeys. It became the first film to sweep the board of the Razzies, winning in each category, including Worst Picture, Worst Director, Worst Actor, Worst Actress and Worst Screenplay.
Adam Sandler plays twins (yes, both of them) on a family cruise vacation aboard Royal Caribbean’s Allure of the Seas. It is spectacularly unfunny.
I’ve said too much already.
- Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes
- Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score: 3%
- Rotten Tomatoes audience score: 36%
- Available for streaming on Amazon Prime here
Streaming availability may vary by region. Links above relate to the UK market.
Whether you are looking to plan a cruise or just after a good sofa-and-popcorn night, I hope this list of cruise ship movies hits the spot.
More cinematic travel inspiration:
- Best Movies Set in Italy on Netflix & Amazon Prime
- Best Movies Set in France on Netflix & Amazon Prime
About Bridget
Bridget Coleman is a complete cinephile and has been a passionate traveller for more than 30 years. She has visited 70+ countries, most as a solo traveller.
Articles on this site reflect her first-hand experiences.
To get in touch, email her at hello@theflashpacker.net or follow her on social media.