James Cameron, the filmmaker of Titanic, has had enough of your explanations for how Jack might have lived after 25 years.
One of the most hotly contested movie sequences in recent memory is this one: By giving Rose (Kate Winslet) complete access to a pretty sizable floating piece of wood towards the movie’s conclusion, Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) manages to save Rose. He says his heartfelt goodbyes and is soon dead from hypothermia after being left by her side in the icy sea.
Since the movie’s 1997 debut, fans, celebrities, and even the Mythbusters crew have proposed many scenarios for how Jack may have lived. In order to finally, finally put the issue to rest, Cameron, who is now marketing his most recent box office hit, Avatar: The Way of Water, is taking action. Fans will be able to see the results for themselves very soon.
Speaking to the Toronto Sun, the director revealed he has conducted a “scientific study” that proves the raft couldn’t have been shared. “We have done a scientific study to put this whole thing to rest and drive a stake through its heart once and for all,” Cameron said. “We have since done a thorough forensic analysis with a hypothermia expert who reproduced the raft from the movie and we’re going to do a little special on it that comes out in February.”
He continued, “We took two stunt people who were the same body mass of Kate and Leo and we put sensors all over them and inside them and we put them in ice water and we tested to see whether they could have survived through a variety of methods and the answer was, there was no way they both could have survived. Only one could survive.”
Ok, but did he ever consider saving Jack in some other way? “No, he needed to die,” Cameron told the outlet. “It’s like Romeo and Juliet. It’s a movie about love and sacrifice and mortality. The love is measured by the sacrifice.”
The National Geographic broadcast of Cameron’s experiment will coincide with Titanic’s upcoming Valentine’s Day weekend 4k restoration re-release in cinemas. The optimism expressed by Cameron is that “maybe…maybe…after 25 years, I won’t have to deal with this anymore.”
