- Rose's granddaughter is grown up, and likely has a daughter of her own.
- Rose's GREAT-granddaughter meets a boy during a vacation in Louisiana...
- The very last scene shows Rose as a young woman, reunited with Jack on the Titanic's grand staircase as other people applaud them. Clearly she died.
- Perhaps Jack Dawson is actually Cobb from Inception. Maybe he entered Rose's mind and created all of the false memories of Jack Dawson, as well as the dream at the end.
- Alternatively, the whole movie is a dream: This is Cobb's first attempt at Inception. He got into Rose's dream, in which she is a woman who survived the Titanic. As the scientists ask her questions, Cobb goes down one dream level and introduces himself as Jack Dawson to a visually young version of her. He successfully gets out of Rose's dream. Unfortunately, since this is his first attempt, he was not sure how to get Rose out of the dream. When she died in her sleep on the first dream level, she went into limbo, forever trapped in a dream in which she is still with Jack Dawson on the Titanic.
It is heavily implied that Rose wants to break out of her upper class lifstyle in general, not just to get away from Cal. One of the reasons for this is that Rose's own father was also controlling, domineering and abusive and to go from being treated so badly by him to being treated the same way by Cal is the proverbial straw that's broken the camel's back. And like Cal, the elder Dewitt Bukater committed suicide when he went into debt and lost money. Jack is clearly different from anyone else Rose has ever known in terms of his passion and free-spiritedness which is precisely why she finds him so attractive.
Rose tells Lizzie and the others that Cal commited suicide in 1929 shortly after the stock market crash. Rose had worked as an actress during the 1920s before starting a family, according to Lewis. Cal really shot himself because he saw one of Rose's films, or plays (we don't know if she was a film or theatre actress), realized that she actually survived the Titanic disaster after all and was so shattered by the fact that she was apparently living a happy life without him that he couldn't live with himself.
- Cal sees Rose in the third class section of the Carpathia, but appears not to dwell on it as he sees her from behind.
No previous records about him? Check. Anachronistic attitude and haircut? Check. Interested in things that weren't popular then? Check. Lived his childhood next to a man-made lake in Wisconsin that wouldn't be built for another three years? Check. Evidently, Jack was a time-traveler from The Future that ended somehow in 1912 Europe and was making his way back to America where presumably his time machine had been left.
Why didn't he know the Titanic would sink? Because it didn't in the original timeline. He and Rose caused the disaster when they distracted the lookouts with their night kiss by the bow.
- Building on this, we can conclude that the entire sinking was the result of the universe attempting to correct a temporal paradox.
- Killing over 1500 people to correct a temporal paradox? The Universe is a bitch!
- Better than killing well over a billion humans, uncounted numbers of animals, plants, and other living things, and destroying everything in existence. And Jack is Jack Harkness with Magic Plastic Surgery. Someone stopped the original cause of the Titanic crashing, so Jack had to distract the lookouts somehow. He doesn't drown (permanently) and Rose is now unkillable (but aging).
- Jack also commented on the Santa Monica Pier, which did exist in 1912 but wasn't yet the attraction it became a few years later. This is just another example of Jack forgetting that he was in an earlier time.
- In the movie, the Titanic sank because of Jack and Rose distracted the watchmen... Stable Time Loop? He was supposed to stop the ship from sinking, but Rose kisses him and he misses his moment.
- Not quite this idea but close enough.
Unfortunately, Rose has an idiot moment and decides to go back on board as the ship goes down. Jack has then to craft a new plan and give her his spot on the floating wood, sacrificing himself for her and the future of mankind. Although he might have failed to impregnate her, his action and his speech to encourage her to have a long life and lots of grandsons was successful: her immune offspring reached the late '90s, and so a cure could be created and humanity was saved.
- Jack does tell Rose that he is "a survivor" when he was trying to get her in a boat. Maybe he meant that he knew that if she went into the boat he would survive? This would back up this theory as it would make perfect sense. He already knew he would be a survivor.
- Alternatively, Rose is the Grandmother of Sarah Connor and Jack was sent back in time to ensure that she didn't kill herself.
- Jack is actually the angel Castiel sent back in time to fix Balthazar's meddling in Supernatural. How's that for a Stable Time Loop Mind Screw?
Rose Dewitt Bukater actually did go down with the ship, and Jack Dawson never existed, hence the story of the card game. Rose Dawson Calvert, a failed actress, had always been interested in the Titanic. Realizing that she was a dead ringer for the girl who died on the ship, she stole a name that would suit her and made up an elaborate story for how she came into possession of the necklace (which is actually a clever fake) for one last attempt at fame and fortune. Eventually she decided that her fake necklace would never pass for the Heart of the Ocean under close inspection and threw it away. That night, she had a dream about the Titanic and imagined what it would be like to be the deceased Rose Dewitt Bukater in heaven with Jack forever. In actuality, Jack was a figment of her imagination, and the real Rose died for unknown reasons.
- This could also explain why Jack talks about places that don't exist until after the sinking of the Titanic, she could have made an oversight when creating Jack's back story.
- How did she know about the Hockley family?
- Maybe she did her research? She probably knew that if she were to be taken seriously she would have to have some sort of idea what she was talking about, so it would make sense that she looked into the history of Rose, her family and the Cur de la Mer.
- It wouldn't have been difficult, if Rose and Cal's upcoming marriage was indeed a large event that included all the members of Philadelphia society, then a fraud would be able to find a lot information about the Hockleys.
It doesn't seem likely that a 1912 socialite would agree to be drawn like that.
He becomes Aquaman!
- So it was him who called the dolphins to save the survivors... oh, nevermind.
- Or because he slowed down his biological processes using trick he had learned while studying with Tibetan Monks. Counting this in addiction with the guesses above that he was a time-traveler, when he slipped into the water, he traveled to another time because he set his time-machine to send him back when he completely submerged and unconscious.
- OR, he survived and kept and the Heart of the Ocean to make enough money to build his own fortune for ten years, and finding another woman who also has a flower for a name, to become Jay Gatsby, who has a notable fear of swimming pools.
- Rose agreed to be engaged to Cal but didn't care about him. She was marrying him for his money, which is pretty self-serving — though you have to be unusually audacious to consider the alternatives. Her mom basically tells her to grin and bear it — her mom needs the money, too. Throwing the necklace into the ocean satisfies the life-long need to let go; but couldn't she "let go" in another way, even taking it to a pawn shop and saying "I'm letting go of the past..." like normal people do?
- That necklace was presumed lost in the wreck. She had it all the time. She knew it was wanted. She talked the guy who was hunting for it out of hunting for it, and then she dropped it into the wreck. It's like if someone had hidden a genuine original Picasso in the attic, which we only know existed because we have a photograph from before it was hidden, and the person decides to destroy the painting rather than let it be auctioned off after death... She may have the right, and he was a treasurehunter, but it's inconsiderate.
- And at the end, when she dies, she is back with Jack and all the people from the Titanic, who she could only have known for like a week. What, did she care more about a guy she knew for a week than her husband with whom she had children and grand-children?!? Yes, he did change her life forever, but still...
- That only looks like heaven.
- Think about it: the events happening in the past are Rose's story, right? It's not what really happened, it's what Rose tells the Brock's crew happened. Makes sense she'd potray herself and her lover as near saints and her ex-fiance as a complete asshole: the easiest way to justify your adultery is to cast the cheated party as a jerk who deserved it.
- Look at old Rose's photographs at the end. They're not photos of her husband, children and grandchildren; they're all pictures of her. Rose travels with pictures of Rose.
- Look closer at her photographs. You do see pictures of her with her children. There's even a photo of what appears to be a graduation (presumably one of her children's).
- Might have been intentional on James Cameron's part?
- Nope, that photo was made in 2004.
- That doesn't mean he didn't see them before the photo was taken. He dived the wreck multiple times while making the film.
- Nope, that photo was made in 2004.
- They're all clapping because Rose is one of the things they need to free themselves.
- Or maybe they're free when Rose arrives?
- Or maybe the kiss between the two lost lovers freed them? Which is why they didn't clapped when Rose arrived, but rather when the two of them (Jack and Rose) kissed?
- The alternative (that this is the afterlife FOREVER and the Titanic is their heaven, which begs the question why Cal is clearly visible in the background) certainly sucks, especially if you were one of the crew ("Yay, I get to open doors and 'yes-sir-yes-ma'am' to self-serving jackasses forever for the sin of having been a crew member on the Titanic!")
- That could of course be Cal's punishment(he certainly doesn't look happy). Plus the "crew members" likely wouldn't have to do anything they found drudging in Titanic-heaven, only good stuff. More likely they'd all move on to where they wanted to go, or BE the upper class, or partiers, or whathaveyou....
- A nice idea, but near the end Rose tells her granddaughter that she never mentioned Jack to anyone, "not even your grandfather". Rose married some time after the crash and never spoke of her lost lover again, which would be hard if she had the guy's kid to look after. Then again, most of what she's having to do after the Titanic sinks will be hard, seeing as she just rejected her social class outright by faking her death.
- It's highly unlikely that she became pregnant by Jack. She probably wouldn't have been able to become an actress and have all those adventures you see photographs of if she'd had a small child to look after. As for Lizzie's resemblance to Jack, it just means that whoever Rose married probably reminded her of Jack in some way.
- Unless she had her first child before she met her husband. He probably would asked about her first child's father but Rose might not want to have to talk about it.
- And if you think about it, she has the best excuse in the world-she just says she and her child's father were on the Titanic, she made it, he didn't, the memory's too traumatic for details. There's "Rose Dawson" right there on the third-class survivor list to back up her story, her husband never has any reason to question it.
- If she did get pregnant after sleeping with Jack, the stress of the prolonged exposure to freezing water, the recovery after the rescue, and starting a new life would probably cause a miscarriage.
- Operating on the theory that Inception pics up where Titanic left off (Jack downs in ocean, wakes up on beach in Limbo) This sinking of the Titanic very well could be a dream, which explains how Jack grew up at a lake that didn't exist when the Titanic sails
- Dom had performed an extraction on Rose at some point before 1997, in order to experience a first-hand account of the sinking for some historian and to try to fill in a few of the blanks. This helps explain why there are scenes that Rose was not present for. As for Lovejoy, he was Dom's partner, but then betrayed him and just wanted to know where the diamond was. His totem bullet was weighted so that in the real world, it would actually tumble and not fall evenly on a tilted surface.
- Unless you shoot someone in a remote area where no one would ever want to go, people WILL hear the gunshot and alert the police.
