In a rare show of humility, James Cameron admits ‘Titanic’ probably had room for Jack on the door

Someday, there will be thesis papers studying the multifaceted ego of James Cameron. For what egregious amounts of space it’s capable of taking up, it’s hard not to admit that the mind behind Aliens, Terminator 2, and True Lies hasn’t somewhat earned the right to such an ego, no matter what the Avatar detractors have to say.

And while now is as good a time as ever for James Cameron to tone down his amour propre, since the still-accumulating box office gross of Avatar: The Way of Water will more than compensate for it, a splash of modesty from the filmmaker, however brief, is a camera-worthy moment of history, especially given that it involves one of the most meme-worthy nuances in the history of movies.

As part of the National Geographic special Titanic: 25 Years Later with James Cameron, a Titanic retrospective in which Cameron and a team of experts recreate a variety of the film’s events to see if they would have occurred during the real-life disaster, Cameron dared to try and answer the age-old question of whether Jack could have survived with Rose that fateful night.

From what we saw in the video above, it seems as though most of the scenarios pointed towards Jack’s survival, a discovery that Cameron was happy to take on the chin, even if he was a bit wishy-washy about it.

In Cameron’s defense, all the simulation in the world wouldn’t have been able to account for whatever animal-like stress that Jack was dealing with at the time, so even if it was physically possible for him to have survived, the odds of him and Rose figuring it out in the short window of time they had tosses the question back up into the air.

For those of you that demand answers, Titanic will re-release in cinemas this Valentine’s Day in honor of the film’s 25th anniversary, offering the prime opportunity to study every pixel in an attempt to validate your opinion on Jack’s arguably preventable death.