Two decades may have passed, but many fans still wonder if Rose and Jack could have survived together on the makeshift "raft" after the sinking of the Titanic. That makes Jack Dawson one of the fictional characters with one of the most active afterlives.
The motion film Titanic may be one of the films with most nominations to the Oscars (14, tying with All About Eve), and one of the movies awarded most Oscars (11 awards, tying with The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King), but that hasn't stopped the debate that keeps surfacing: Did our hero Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) really have to die?
When James Cameron was asked for an official response to the long-debated claim that Jack and Rose could have both survived the Titanic tragedy if Rose had just moved over a bit, James Cameron said: "It's not a question of room; it's a question of buoyancy."
As a response, the hosts of the TV show "MythBusters" - Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman - have explored this possibility by doing what they do best: testing the theory. The MythBusters professionals tackled the "Room For Two" meme at Cameron's decision.
The MythBusters tried the theory out on the raft and they found that Cameron was right about the raft sinking with both of them on it, but there is a way around it. They concluded that using Rose's life jacket, they could have easily added enough buoyancy to the plank to make it suitable for two survivors.
Cameron rebutted the science put forward by MythBusters to keep both Jack and Rose out of the frigid waters.
"OK, so let's really play that out," Cameron said. "You're Jack, you're in water that's 28 degrees, your brain is starting to get hypothermia. ‘MythBusters' asks you to now go take off your life vest, take hers off, swim underneath this thing, attach it in some way that it won't just wash out two minutes later - which means you're underwater tying this thing on in 28-degree water, and that's going to take you 5-to-10 minutes, so by the time you come back up you're already dead. So that wouldn't work. His best choice was to keep his upper body out of the water and hope to get pulled out by a boat or something before he died."
And that's what he did, but unfortunately, rescue came too late. Rose, who was on the raft, woke deeply chilled to find Jack frozen on the edge of the raft, and had to pry him off.
Cameron added one more thing about the MythBusters' story: "They're fun guys and I loved doing that show with them, but they're full of s..."
At the end of the show, James Cameron also explained that Jack's fate was sealed from the start and nothing could have changed it.
"I think you guys are missing the point here," Cameron told MythBusters back in 2012 when they performed the experiment. "The script says Jack dies, he has to die. Maybe we screwed up, The board should have been a tiny bit smaller. But the dude's going down."