(Beijing) Good news: 23 years later, fight club, the cult film by David Fincher, is finally available in China on the internet. Bad news: the ending has been changed.
Posted at 9:38
The communist regime only allows a few foreign films to be shown in China each year, and censors do not hesitate to remove scenes considered disturbing.
This time it’s fight club, with Brad Pitt and Edward Norton, who paid the ultimate price for the scissors, more than two decades after the release of the American film in 1999.
Moviegoers have noticed that the version of the film broadcast by the Tencent Video platform has somewhat modified the anarchist and anti-capitalist message of the work.
In the original version, the narrator played by Edward Norton kills his imaginary alter ego played by Brad Pitt, then witnesses the explosion of buildings – the destruction of the modern world dreamed by the hero is underway.
The version broadcast in China, on the other hand, ends with a kind of ” happy ending “.
The character played by Brad Pitt is indeed killed off, but the doomsday footage is replaced by a black screen and text that reads, “Police have foiled the plan and arrested all criminals, preventing the bombs from exploding” .
As for the character of Brad Pitt, it is specified that he was interned in “an insane asylum”.
The truncated end of the film aroused the astonishment of many connoisseurs who had probably seen the original version on pirated copies.
“It’s a scandal,” said a movie buff on the Tencent Video site.
“They are no longer content to censor scenes, they are completely changing the scenario”, was offended by a user on the Weibo social network.
Tencent did not comment on this information. It was difficult to say if the changes were imposed by the authorities or if they were the result of a decision by the producers of the film.
Hollywood studios sometimes take it upon themselves to cut certain scenes from films in the hope of obtaining clearance for the Chinese market.
In 2019, several scenes of Bohemian Rhapsody referring to the sexuality of Freddie Mercury, the singer of the group Queen, had been erased from the version broadcast in China.