You know, you are on a site devoted to Star Wars, so calling this subtle difference “obscenely revisionist” is taking it a bit too far. Now the Star Wars SE, DVD, and blu-ray could be called obscenely revisionist, but what Cameron has done to Titanic involves minor tweaks of the sort I wish Lucas had made to Star Wars.
There’s nothing “minor” about digitizing the whole film from the camera negative and then re-compositing everything. By comparison Blade Runner was digitised from the camera negative for the unedited shots, and from the master positives or intermediate negatives for all the shots with optical effects. And that’s standard now for a 4K remaster.
But I should note there was absolutely no reason to do an extensive restoration for a recent flick like Titanic anyway, all they had to do was scan the o-neg, grade it to the print, and release it. Easy peasy.
Again, compared to what Lucas has done, what was done to Titanic is nothing. It is literally insignificant in comparison. Terming it “obscenely revisionist” is extremely exaggerated. What editing changes were made? From all the previous posts I’ve read, nothing was changed that affected he story or even the run time. Where even Blade Runner has been edited in ways that affect the run time (though he was nice enough to include the 4 previous releases if you bought the full set). And Star Wars has been edited with every new release going clear back to the original 77 releases (at least three effects shots were replaced after the film was released). JC just cleaned things up and tweaked some sky shots for the HD released. That is not a new thing to do. If that was all Lucas had done to Star Wars in 97, I don’t think this site would even exist.