"Mythbusters" tackles "Titanic" debate: Did Jack have to die?

Leonardo DiCaprio, right, and Kate Winslet in a scene from "Titanic." / Paramount Pictures

The movie is 15 years old, but the question still remains -- did Jack really have to die in "Titanic"?

At the end of James Cameron's 1997 epic, Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) froze to death in the water as he clung to the makeshift raft that Rose (Kate Winslet) was laying on.

Some have wondered whether there was enough room for both of them on that wooden plank. Cameron responded last month by saying it wasn't a question of room, but buoyancy -- if both of them had tried to stay on the raft, he argued, the whole thing would sink.

But the guys from "Mythbusters" decided to test the theory themselves. They discovered that if Rose had strapped her lifejacket to the bottom of the raft, there would have been enough buoyancy to keep both of them afloat.

When they presented their findings to Cameron, he insisted that Jack couldn't be saved.

"You guys are missing the point here," he told "Mythbusters" duo Adam and Jamie. "The script says Jack dies. He has to die. So maybe we screwed up and the board should have been a tiny bit smaller, but the dude's going down."

[martinab1]

all died......except one

[tapittwice]

I thought that the guy's from myth busters tested theories where any legends origin was in dispute, not to theorize about fake characters from a Hollywood script in a movie scene rooted in fiction. Could Jack have survived? No! because he never existed. What are they gonna test next? To see if they could reproduce Rodney Dangerfield's dive from "back to school"? Maybe after watching Star Wars again, they will dedicate a whole show to try to disprove the "myth" that chewbacca can actually talk, fight and fly a space ship at the same time?

[bobnjersey]

[I thought that the guy's from myth busters tested theories where any legends origin was in dispute, not to theorize about fake characters from a Hollywood script in a movie scene rooted in fiction.]
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ahhh ... the sinking of the titanic actually happened ... there was water ... it was cold ... a lot of people ended up in that water ... and some survived and some didn't.

you have a computer in front of you ... i thought it was easy to look these things up.