For more than 27 years, one question has haunted many a movie fan: Could Jack have fit on the piece of wood, frequently mistaken for a door, at the end of James Cameron’s romantic epic, Titanic?
Opinions have been split, and online debates have ensued. In 2012, Discovery Channel’s Mythbusters even tested the hypothesis that Jack could have survived the shipwreck had Rose only scooched over a bit.
According to the Mythbusters’ experiment, it is plausible that Jack could have fit. However, if you were to ask James Cameron himself, it is highly unlikely.
“Let’s really play that out: you’re Jack, you’re in water that’s 28 degrees, your brain is starting to get hypothermia,” he said in an interview with The Daily Beast in 2017. “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 five to ten minutes, so by the time you come back up you’re already dead. So that wouldn’t work.”
But no matter which side of the argument you fall on, the prop has now been sold for a whopping $718,750, according to the BBC.
The prop was, as per auction house Heritage Auctions, based on a piece of debris salvaged from the real Titanic. It had been a part of the door frame of the first-class lounge entrance.