Although Titanic is based on a true story, it has many inaccuracies that ultimately don’t change the movie’s main story, and only one of them was fixed 15 years after Titanic’s release – here’s what it is and why it was changed. James Cameron has explored different genres throughout his career as a filmmaker, and while he’s now mostly associated with science-fiction thanks to movies like The Terminator, Aliens, and Avatar, one of his biggest projects was actually far from that genre: Titanic, a disaster drama movie based on a real-life tragedy.
Based on the accounts of the sinking of the RMS Titanic in 1912, Titanic tells the story of Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet) and Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio), two passengers from different social classes who fell in love aboard the ship during its ill-fated maiden voyage. Over the course of just four days, Jack and Rose fell deeply in love and even made plans for when the ship arrived in America, but their romance wasn’t meant to be, and even though they both fought to survive, Jack ended up being one of the many victims of the sinking of the Titanic. Rose, on the other hand, was eventually rescued and lived for many more years. Titanic was a huge critical and commercial success, but that doesn’t mean that it’s a flawless movie.
As it happens with any other movie based on real-life events, Titanic isn’t entirely accurate and has various historical mistakes and more, but these don’t really affect the story of Rose and Jack and there’s no need to “fix” them, where possible. However, James Cameron did change one scene in Titanic when preparing the 3D version of the movie. The Titanic 3D version was released in 2012 and was a re-mastering of the original movie to 4K resolution and post-conversion to stereoscopic 3D format, which also allowed the audience to see more image on the top and bottom of the screen thanks to a new aspect ratio, and it included a completely redone scene of the night sky view as Rose drifted away in the ocean.
When Rose and Jack are waiting in the ocean to be rescued, with Rose on the infamous door and Jack with half his body underwater, there’s a shot of the night sky from Rose’s perspective (as she sang her and Jack’s song “Come Josephine, In My Flying Machine”). It’s not a long shot nor one actually relevant in the story, and while viewers might not find anything bad in it, Neil deGrasse Tyson certainly did. The astrophysicist pointed out that that specific scene shows an unrealistic star pattern as that wouldn’t have been what Rose would have seen in that position in the Atlantic in 1912, and he actually emailed Cameron about it. Cameron shared that, given his “reputation as a perfectionist”, he told Tyson to send him “the right stars for that exact time” so he could put them in the movie – and that’s how the 3D version of Titanic had a completely redone scene so it could be scientifically accurate.
Prior to that change, Tyson had already expressed his frustration with the movie and how Cameron paid attention to every detail of the Titanic and its sinking but got “the wrong sky”. Surely, the original scene wasn’t really a major mistake that entirely changed the story of Titanic, and there are bigger inaccuracies throughout the movie than a star pattern, but Neil deGrasse Tyson definitely knew how to get to James Cameron to get that detail changed.