There’s probably a lot of different variables, cows vs bulls, the breed, how they’re being raised, if they have calves with them, how you’re behaving, etc.
In general though, safest bet is always going to be to give them space and not approach them. Not to say they’re necessarily going to be aggressive or anything, but that’s just kind of rule number 1 with any animals you’re not familiar with.
Annecdotally, when I was a teenager, I did Philmont, which is a big property the Boy Scouts of America (now changing their name to Scouting America) owns in New Mexico, where scouts can go backpacking. They also maintain a working cattle ranch there, and I believe so e of the neighboring ranches allow their cattle to (grave? Free range? Roam? I’m not sure of the correct terminology) the Philmont property, so it’s not uncommon to encounter cows in various places there.
They give pretty much the same lecture, don’t approach them, don’t do anything to spook them, and give them some space.
At one point my group was hiking along a trail coming to a junction, and a few dozen cows came down the trail we were about to head up and went into the woods. We weren’t super close to them, but it was probably about the closest I’ve been to a cow outside of a petting zoo in my life, and there was nothing but a few yards of open trail between us. We just stood back and watched them go about their business, the cows didn’t pay any attention to us, we hung out for a couple minutes after they passed in case there were any stragglers, and sure enough there was a lone cow that came running down the trail trying to catch up with its friends.
I’m no cow-ologist, but my general understanding is that they tend to be fairly laid back, and if anything curious. That said, they’re big, powerful animals and you don’t want to spook them.
There was already some amount of cultural awareness about the Titanic prior to the movie, after all they pretty much started making movies, plays, documentaries, etc. as soon as it happened and kept right on making them
It also got a pretty good bump in popularity when the wreck was found in the 80s
Even if the movie weren’t made, there’d probably be a pretty decent chunk of people who would know about it from the scene in Ghostbusters 2 if nothing else.
It probably wouldn’t be something that pretty much everyone knows about, and certainly not in the kind of detail we do now, but you’d probably still have a pretty good chance of people who’d at least know that it was a big passenger ship that sank.
It’s hard for me to be impartial about this though, I was in elementary school when the movie came out, prime age to learn how to play “my heart will go on” on the recorder in music class and to see that big brick of 2 VHS tapes for rent in blockbuster. To this day I actually haven’t seen it, but it’s hard for me to imagine a world that people don’t know about the Titanic because the movie was just so omnipresent in my formative years.