`TITANIC' ON ICE UNTIL DEC. 19.

Byline: Dave McNary Daily News Staff Writer

``Titanic,'' already the most expensive and riskiest movie ever made, officially sailed off the summer schedule Tuesday and into a Dec. 19 release date.

Paramount Pictures confirmed what had been rumored for months - that the James Cameron production, re-creating the 1912 sinking of the ocean liner, could not be finished on time for release during the lucrative summer moviegoing season.

Filming had been completed earlier this spring on a 775-foot replica of the Titanic floating in a water tank in Baja California. But extensive and complicated postproduction work on its 250 special-effects shots made a delay inevitable, to the point that rivals had already readjusted their own summer release schedules.

Paramount and 20th Century Fox, its financial partner on the project, had abandoned the original July 2 date weeks ago and were hoping for a late-summer opening but had never settled on a new date.

``The decision to push was a difficult one which required us to compare the rising curve of compromises to the film against the descending curve of commercial gain in the summer,'' said Robert G. Friedman, vice chairman of Paramount's motion picture group. ``As both Paramount and Fox believe strongly that the film can play well in any season, we elected to move out of an already crowded summer.''

``We all felt that we might have had to compromise the story if we had kept a summer release,'' he added.

Friedman said using the two final weeks of the year makes sense both in terms of selling the movie to the broadest possible audience and positioning it as an Academy Awards contender. ``It just feels right to release it on December 19,'' he said.

``Titanic'' became the fourth major movie to fall off the summer schedule and head for late-year release, joining Disney/Sony's ``Starship Troopers,'' Fox's ``Alien Resurrection'' and Paramount's ``The Flood.'' But it has problems far greater than all the others.

For one, the budget is continuing to grow. The lowest current estimate of the budget is $180 million - $5 million more than Universal spent to bring in another ocean-going movie, ``Waterworld'' - but analysts believe the delay will add another $20 million in costs.

Furthermore, the marketing of ``Titanic'' will be difficult since Cameron's version of the tragedy is not one of his action films (``Terminator 2,'' ``The Abyss,'' ``True Lies'') but a genre with considerably less box-office potential: a three-hour love epic between a passenger in steerage (Leonardo DiCaprio) and a high-society lady on the upper decks (Kate Winslet).

``Titanic'' will also face plenty of competition Dec. 19. Although nearly seven months away, the date has already been targeted by several strong contenders, including Fox's ``Home Alone 3,'' Sony's ``Zorro'' and Universal's ``For Richer or Poorer.''

Fox probably did not want the movie released in November since it has already scheduled two major projects that month: ``Alien Resurrection'' and ``Anastasia,'' its first animated feature.

For Fox, ``Titanic'' has become a potential nightmare because Paramount's investment in the movie is capped at $65 million. Paramount is handling domestic distribution while Fox is marketing the film overseas, so the delay means that Fox will not see any revenues coming until the first quarter of 1998 at the earliest.

Fox Filmed Entertainment Chairman Bill Mechanic, whose star has risen due to last summer's success with ``Independence Day'' and this winter's re-release of the ``Star Wars'' trilogy, now faces a troubling scenario of creating a massive loss on the balance sheet of parent News Corp. at a time when Chairman Rupert Murdoch has been on a spending spree in the television and sports fields.

Additionally, Fox's other main summer entry is ``Speed 2,'' due out June 13 amid forecasts that it will have a tough time making back its $100 million production and marketing budget.

Cameron's special-effects house, Digital Domain, had been operating on an accelerated schedule in recent weeks to try to ready ``Titanic'' in time.

``While my initial instinct was to stick with summer, as this project evolved I think we all became more confident that `Titanic' did not necessarily need the hysteria of the summer season to be a box-office success,'' Cameron said in a statement. ``And although it was not the deciding factor, I am personally looking forward to screening my film in its finished form several months in advance of its release date, a luxury my postproduction schedules have never afforded me.''

Cameron began spending on the project two years ago by making 12 dives into the North Atlantic to get footage of the wreck, to be used at the start of the movie. His production deal with Fox calls for 12 movies over five years but that is widely believed to have been renegotiated.