James Cameron is not worth having burst the box office (again) with Avatar: The Water Sense, the sequel to his success that has rescued theaters and has brought figures to theaters that they have not seen for many years. Cameron is the only director who has chained three consecutive films, surpassing the tremendous amount of 2,000 million dollars worldwide. He has done it with Avatar 2which currently exceeds 2,174 million dollars worldwide, a figure that has not been seen since… its predecessor, Avatar, which premiered in 2009 and ended its career at 2,743 million. The one that also exceeded that unattainable figure for the majority was Titanic.
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In 1997 Cameron told a love story aboard the most famous ocean liner in history and it was a hit. She exceeded 2,194 million dollars and won 11 Oscars, the highest figure in history (tied with Ben-How y The return of the King). The tragic romance of Jack and Rose turns 25 (in Spain it was released in January 1998) and since Cameron knows no limits, he is premiering a remastered and three-dimensional version of his own classic. In a crazy twist, Titanic y Avatar 2 They will meet in rooms. Two mastodons that are the example of the director’s ambition, and also of his way of understanding cinema as a show made to amaze an audience that is finding it increasingly difficult to get up from the sofa and go to the theater. Cameron gets it, and now he wants people to pay to see a movie he already knows.
There is no doubt that James Cameron knows what his fans want, and this rerun is joined by the arrival of a National Geographic documentary that has been broadcast in the US on Hulu and that, under the name of Titanic: 25 Years Later, addresses the question fans have been asking for more than two decades: could Jack fit on the wooden plank Rose climbed on? Since its premiere, the end of the film has been commented on, parodied, and turned into a meme and joke. The door where Kate Winslet’s character climbs while she watches her lover freeze and drown seems, to the eyes of the viewer, large enough for both of them to climb.
Could Jack have fit on the door with Rose? We settle the debate in “Titanic: 25 Years Later” tonight, Sunday, at 9/8c on National Geographic pic.twitter.com/rwwX4M8CKR
— James Cameron (@JimCameron) February 5, 2023
An answer that Cameron could have given in a concise way, but that he has preferred to exploit in the form of a scientific experiment. The director has recreated the scene using two doubles that have the same weight and height as the one that his two protagonists, Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, had then. He performs various tests on them to see if, in any of them, Jack could have lived. In the first one, they both get on the board, because they did fit… but they sink, something that Cameron had been providing as an excuse for a long time. But the experiment does not stop there and they try other positions, such as making them only raise half of the body, which would have saved their vital organs. A test in which they do not take into account the fatigue factor of all the previous incidents, for which he asks them for a third attempt.
First he asks the doubles to do everything Jack and Rose had done to arrive as tired as they are and he asks her to give him his vest when he has already climbed on the board and is safe. That’s when James Cameron recognizes what fans have been saying for so long: they could have ended up together. “He stabilizes. We got to a situation where, if we had, Jack could have held out until the lifeboat arrived,” he acknowledges. What nobody takes into account is that narratively the film would be different. First, because the director himself sold this film to the studio as “Romeo and Juliet on the Titanic.”
We are facing another crisis called climate change and it is like that iceberg. We are going to crash into it and it will be suffered by the poor, not the rich nations that caused it.
James Cameron
— Director of dinner
He told it at a press conference on the occasion of the 25th anniversary where he analyzed the phenomenon and denied that the success was due to a generation of young adolescents in love with Leonardo DiCaprio. On the contrary, she believes that it was the feminist and empowering message of the film that resonated with people. A message that has been claimed by directors such as Celine Sciamma, author of Portrait of a woman on fire o Little mom, who has always defended how revolutionary it was to see a movie from a large Hollywood studio where the woman was not traumatized by the death of her lover, but rather was seen fulfilled, having achieved feminist milestones in that review in the form of photos to the Rose’s post-Titanic life. Sciamma also highlighted the car sex scene in which the woman is seen taking the initiative and being the one enjoying it, turning patriarchal stereotypes in the industry on its head.
“I accept that $100 million of the total box office may have gone for Leonardo DiCaprio’s appeal to 14-year-old girls, but what I think was really happening is that the film was a catalyst for young women finding themselves in a point in their life when society tells them not to be who they really are. Let them not be the amazing and limitless people they really are, and they are told to sit down, shut up, and put on that corset, and do what a male dominated society expects. This is a movie that talks about Rose and the realization of her as a person. Jack was important to her, but we see those photos later where it shows that she had a full life. She realized all her potential and I think that speaks to the female side of the audience and to the men who care about such things, ”cameron settled.
The director also revealed that Leonardo DiCaprio was slow to decide on the project because he did not consider his role “challenging enough”. “I was looking for challenges, to finish doing Who does Gilbert Grape love? and played a drug addict in A rebels’ Diary and he wanted his character to have a problem, something that would make him angry, but that wasn’t in the script. I had to convince him to play someone who doesn’t have a problem, who is in fact the more emotionally mature of the two leads, and explain to him that the transfer of energy and the love story is from Jack to Rose. I told him ‘that’s going to be a very difficult thing to do.’ Only when I convinced him that there was a challenge did he become interested in the film, ”he says.
Although 25 years have passed, James Cameron believes that in Titanic there is a message that goes beyond the love story and makes it universal and intergenerational, and that is that it shows how tragedies always affect the poorest: “Those who have money they survive, and the poor die. Nearly all the third-class men were killed, and half the children and women too. While in first class only half of the men died and almost all the women and children were saved. There is a stark disparity between the fate of the poor and the rich when there is a crisis. Now we are facing another crisis called climate change and it is exactly like that damn iceberg. Let’s crash into him and guess who will suffer the most. The poor, not the rich nations that caused it.”