‘Titanic’ Door that Saved Rose (But Not Jack) Fetches Six Figures at Auction

The prop from one of the most memorable scenes in the 1997 film Titanic—in which Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jack selflessly freezes to death in the North Atlantic while Kate Winslet’s character, Rose, lies on a door and thus lives to tell their tale—has sold at Heritage Auctions for a jamb-busting $718,750.

According to Entertainment Weekly, the door was the evening’s top lot, second only to the whip used by Indiana Jones in the series’ second installment The Temple of Doom, which sold for $525,000.

The Great Door Debate is among the most popular topics in modern cinematic history, with everyone from Celine Dion to Victor Garber taking a stance. But, according to EW, the film’s director James Cameron settled the debate in 2022, the year of Titanic’s 25th anniversary.

“We have done a scientific study to put this whole thing to rest and drive a stake through its heart once and for all,” Cameron said during an interview to promote Avatar: The Way of Water. “We took two stunt people who were the same body mass of Kate and Leo and we put sensors all over them and inside them and we put them in ice water and we tested to see whether they could have survived through a variety of methods and the answer was, there was no way they both could have survived. Only one could survive.”

And so the debate ends. But for the new owner of Jack and Rose’s door, the final moments of what is arguably the most bittersweet romance of the 1990s can live on forever.