They called it “The Night to Remember” — over and over and over again.

The RMS Titanic struck an iceberg and sank 12,500 feet to the floor of the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Canada 111 years ago. In that time, the infamous luxury ocean liner — and the more than 1,500 passengers who perished with her — has lingered in the public consciousness perhaps longer than any other seafaring disaster.

Most recently, the unsettling disappearance of the OceanGate Titan submersible carrying five intrepid tourists to visit the haunting shipwreck reinvigorated conversations about the Titanic’s unique position as both a solemn icon and a bona fide industry with star power that translates from Hollywood to the auction block.

Below is a thorough overview of the afterlife of the world’s most-famous, most-doomed ship with billions to her name.

The Titanic was on its maiden voyage from the UK to New York City when it sank in the North Atlantic Ocean in the early hours of April 15, 1912. The exact location of the wreck was unknown until Sept. 1, 1985, when a Franco-American expedition helmed by Robert Ballard and Jean-Louis Michel located it on the ocean floor about 350 miles off the coast of Newfoundland.

“I think my exact words were, ‘The sucker really exists,’” Ballard told Forbes of the discovery in 2017.

The famed underwater archaeologist compared the emotional impact of the wreck to the site of Pickett’s Charge at the Battle of Gettysburg.

“There was so much more to the story. There were the lifeboats, the survivors, the boats that came to help, the band playing, the rockets firing — all of the play that acted itself out,” he recalled.

Ballard and Michel’s mission also discovered that the ship went down in two parts, with the bow and the stern settling about one-third of a mile from each other.

Twelve years after Ballard and Michel first sighted the wreck, the moment the ocean liner fractured in mid-air was immortalized in James Cameron’s Oscar-winning romance epic “Titanic.” 

Almost immediately after Ballard and Michel’s discovery was made public, oil tycoon and would-be explorer Jack Grimm claimed that he actually found the desolate wreck first, and therefore owned it, iNews reported.

Although Grimm’s claim was struck down in court, the controversy sparked decades of back-and-forth over the status of the ship’s remains.

The US Congress passed the RMS Titanic Maritime Memorial Act of 1986, which green-lighted negotiations for an international conservation effort as well as the beginning of guidelines for exploration and salvage, per the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The following year, however, a company called Titanic Ventures co-sponsored a survey and salvage operation of the wreck, and was eventually granted title to artifacts retrieved there, iNews said.

In May 1996, Titanic Ventures sold its interests to the salvage firm RMS Titanic Inc. (RMST), which was subsequently challenged by the insurance company that provided compensation after the sinking.

Liverpool and London Steamship Protection and Indemnity Association, which was undertaken by the White Star Line, claimed that it owned property from the vessel because it paid out for them.

The two companies reached an undisclosed settlement in 2007, the outlet explained.

RMST still operates today, but its legal claim only applies to US citizens and US law, historian and White Star Line expert Paul Louden-Brown told The Journal.ie around the centenary of the Titanic disaster.

“So, for example, if I was to sail out of the port of Southampton with a dive recovery vessel, I could dive and retrieve any artifacts I care for from the vessel and no one could do anything about it,” he explained.

Louden-Brown added that, because the Titanic was registered in the UK and owned by a US company, it does not have an official owner.

“Under Admiralty Law which the US, Britain and other major maritime nations adhere to, a vessel lying in international waters is effectively without ownership and no one can actually stake a claim on it,” he said.

Fewer than 250 people have visited the site of the Titanic shipwreck since 1985, TIME reported this week, citing statistics from OceanGate.

Cameron was one of the wreck’s most well-known early visitors.

“I made ‘Titanic’ because I wanted to dive to the shipwreck, not because I particularly wanted to make the movie,” he told Playboy of the experience in 2009.

“The Titanic was the Mount Everest of shipwrecks, and as a diver, I wanted to do it right. When I learned some other guys had dived to the Titanic to make an IMAX movie, I said, ‘I’ll make a Hollywood movie to pay for an expedition and do the same thing.’ I loved that first taste, and I wanted more.”

Luckily, the “Titanic” film covered Cameron’s initial dive — and then some: Upon its debut in 1997, the 194-minute movie made over $2 billion at the box office, making it the highest-grossing film in history at the time.

Since then, Cameron has visited the Titanic wreck at least 33 times, USA Today reported in 2017.

In 2001, an American couple also took the plunge — by tying the knot in a submersible at the shipwreck site.

New Yorkers David Leibowitz and Kimberley Miller made headlines with their controversial nuptials, which some slammed as disrespectful to those who perished in the sinking, the BBC reported.

“We don’t really view this as a gravesite,” Leibowitz, who won the sub trip through the internet diving company, Subsea Explorer, responded at the time.

The crew of the Titan submersible paid $250,000 for their eight-day excursion, according to the BBC.

The startling six-figure price tag reportedly includes training.

Public interest in artifacts from the Titanic — including mementos from both survivors and those who died — began almost immediately after the sinking.

In fact, the morbid fascination with the ship was so widespread that the Canadian authorities who retrieved victims’ bodies from the sea in the days following the tragedy burned the bodies’ clothing to “stop souvenir hunters,” a letter housed at the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic in Nova Scotia indicates.

Some objects, however, survived and were exhibited over the years: The Maritime Museum still displays the leather shoes of an unknown child victim, while the Titanic Historical Society acquired the life jacket used by John Jacob Astor’s young wife, Madeleine. 

After the discovery of the Titanic’s location in the 1980s, however, interest in objects taken from the wreck itself skyrocketed. 

Since 1987, RMST alone has conducted eight expeditions to the site to recover artifacts from in and around the wreck. Among the thousands of rediscovered of objects are china plates from First, Second, and Third Class, as well as numerous leather bags, articles of clothing and jewelry.

To date, the most expensive single artifact from the doomed ocean liner sold at auction is the violin played by band leader Wallace Hartley as the ship’s orchestra tried to calm passengers during the sinking.

The instrument — which features a silver engraving from Hartley’s fiancée — was found 10 days later in a case strapped to Hartley’s body. It was sold for $1.46 million by Henry Aldridge and Son in October 2013.

Aldridge and Son has sold several other Titanic objects, including a storeroom key and an uneaten biscuit that sold for around $178,280 and $19,000, respectively, according to its website.

The Titanic objects industry, however, received a blow in 2020, when the US and the UK signed a treaty to preserve the “sensitivity and respect” of the wreck site — including the prevention of artifact collecting, The Guardian reported.

“Now any salvage by companies or individuals based within the UK and USA will be carried out only with the permission of both countries and will only take place if there is a good educational or cultural reason. This is a new legal barrier which will help better protect the wreck,” maritime law expert Dr. Josh Martin told the outlet at the time.

Historian Don Lynch of the Titanic Historical Society called the Titanic the “ultimate story” in an interview with Salon earlier this year.

“It’s unsinkable, supposedly, and you’ve got it full of all these key people…as well as all these famous people . . . and then on its maiden voyage, it hits an iceberg and then sinks so slowly,” he said.

“And then there’s all this time for all this drama to be acted out, like the band playing — that just doesn’t get duplicated.”

But while the sinking itself was a once-in-a-lifetime tragedy, the drama has moved imaginations — and wallets — countless times over the years.

In the days after the Titanic sank, newsreel films depicting the aftermath of the disaster were played to packed houses around the world.

In his 2000 book “The Titanic and Silent Cinema,” historian Stephen Bottomore says one reel from the Gaumont Film Company was a particularly massive hit. Audiences often sang “Nearer, My God, To Thee” — the Titanic band’s famous last song — during the film’s climax.

The short film “Saved from the Titanic” was released only 31 days after the ship went down. The now-lost movie starred Dorothy Gibson, a noted silent film actress who was also one of the 28 people to board the Titanic’s first lifeboat.

“Saved from the Titanic” was filmed in Fort Lee, New Jersey, and in New York Harbor. To maintain authenticity, Gibson wore the same clothes that she donned during the actual April 15 sinking, the Los Angeles Times said.

In the decades following the Titanic tragedy, the ship and those who went down with it continued to inspire a proliferation of poetry, books and visual art. The public was also encouraged to join in the collective show of grief by purchasing memorial postcards — which were sold in droves in the UK — as well as whiskey jiggers and even black mourning teddy bears.

In more recent years, Titanic-related events continue to draw large audiences — and command hefty price tags: In 1997, the same year as Cameron’s film, a musical based on the tragedy opened on Broadway. The show broke box office records for several weeks and even captured the Tony Award for Best Musical before closing in 1999.

In 2012, the Titanic Belfast museum opened at the former site of the Harland & Wolff shipyard where the ill-fated liner was built. The 130,000-square-foot space, which drew 807,340 visitors in its first year, has been lauded as a key draw for tourists in Northern Ireland.

With Post wires