One of the longest-running debates in modern cinema, aside from the “Die Hard is a Christmas movie” one (editor’s note: “it is”), is regarding the ending of James Cameron’s 1997 epic “Titanic”.
The film closes out with Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jack sacrificing himself to the watery depths of the Atlantic, so his love Rose (Kate Winslet) can survive on the makeshift raft they made out of a floating door.
Arguments have since been raised that the rather large door was big enough to fit both of them. In early 2023, National Geographic released a documentary special with Cameron involved – a documented scientific study to prove two people could not have survived on said door.
Cameron hired two stunt people with height and weight similar to DiCaprio and Winslet at the time of filming and recreated the raft scene in a pool to test multiple theories and outcomes. The results showed that it was essentially impossible, except for one possible way that relied on a whole bunch of unlikely variables.
Three years on, and coming to the tail end of his work promoting “Avatar: Fire and Ash,” Cameron says he won’t bother with questions about the “Titanic” ending anymore. He tells THR’s Awards Chatter podcast:
“Don’t ask me about the f—ing raft, people! Look, we even went to the lengths of doing an experiment to see if Jack could have in any way survived, or if they could have both survived, and people didn’t even hear the answer when I told them the answer.
The answer is, if Jack somehow was an expert in hypothermia and somehow knew what science now knows back in 1912, it is theoretically possible, with a lot of luck, that he might have survived. Therefore, the answer is no, he could not have. There’s no way. The conditions were not met. He couldn’t have known those things.”
“Titanic” remains one of the biggest films ever made, nearly thirty years on. The movie’s gross of $2.3 billion held the record for twelve years until Cameron’s own “Avatar” beat it in 2009.
