It’s a door that sparked debate and divided fans of the film Titanicand now it has been sold at auction for almost a million dollars.

Since the film’s release in 1997, people have wondered whether the wooden plaque that kept Kate Winslet’s Rose out of the frigid waters of the Atlantic Ocean might also have made room for her lover, Jack, played by Leonardo DiCaprio.

Spoiler alert (if you haven’t seen the film in 27 years since its release): In the film’s final scenes, the couple hold on to the door while the ship sinks in the background. They decide that the makeshift raft will not support them both and Jack sacrifices his life for Rose, succumbing to a frozen death while she is ultimately saved.

The Planet Hollywood Treasures auction, which took place over five days last week, offered the iconic piece of fake wreckage and it became the most sold item at auction, with the highest bid of US$718,750 ($975,775 CAD.)

Fans devastated by Jack’s death have long wondered if he actually had to die: Could they both have fit on the door? Should they have taken turns until the rescue boats arrived? Was Rose selfish?

Now, one lucky theorist can test every possible scenario, using the piece of balsa wood – which, according to the auction, was actually part of a door frame above the entrance to the cinema ship’s first class lounge.

In the nearly three decades since Titanic first theatrical release, this scene sparked so much debate that even director James Cameron spoke up.

After an episode from 2012 Myth bustwhere animators Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage conducted a series of experiments that they claimed proved Rose and Jack could have plausibly survived by hanging on to the same piece of wood, Cameron offered a good-natured response: “I think you’re missing the point here.

“The script says Jack is dead. He must die. So maybe we made a mistake and the board should have been a little bit smaller, but the guy is falling,” he said.

He went further in 2022, announcing that he had conducted a “scientific study to put all this aside and drive a stake through his heart once and for all”.

In an elaborate re-enactment, conducted with extensive forensic analysis with a hypothermia expert, they used two stuntmen with the same body mass as Winslet and DiCaprio and a replica raft and submerged them in icy water. run through all possible scenarios put forward by skeptics.

The bottom line: “Jack may have survived, but there are a lot of variables… (and) I think his thought process was, ‘I’m not going to do anything to put him in danger.’ And it fits the character 100 percent.

Around the time of Cameron’s experiment, Winslet also waded into the debate.

“Look, all I can tell you is that I have a good understanding of water and how it behaves,” she said in a 2022 episode. Happy Sad Confused podcasts. “I I think he would have been in good shape, but it would have tipped over and it wouldn’t have been a sustainable idea – yes, it could have fit on that door, but it wouldn’t have stayed afloat. That wouldn’t be the case.

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