This truncated ending outraged some “Fight Club” fans, but Chuck Palahniuk, whose novel inspired the film, said it was closer to the original narrative.
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A legendary scene. At the end of the film fight club, directed by David Fincher in 1999, the narrator played by Edward Norton kills his imaginary alter ego played by Brad Pitt, then witnesses the explosion of buildings symbolizing the destruction of the modern world dreamed of by the hero. But while the film has just been authorized for broadcast in China, the scene visible on the Tencent Video platform ends with a kind of “happy ending”, changing the anarchist and anti-capitalist message of the work. Doomsday images are replaced with a black screen and text saying: “The police foiled the project and arrested all the criminals, preventing the explosion of the bombs.”
This truncated ending scandalized some fans of fight club, but Chuck Palahniuk, whose novel published in 1996 inspired the film, was not moved more than that. “It’s ironic but, the way the Chinese edited it, the ending is almost exactly the same as the book’s”, declared Wednesday January 26 the author with the site TMZ (in English). The end chosen by David Fincher “was much more spectacular visually (…) so in a way, the Chinese brought the film a little closer to the book”, he said. The writer also noted that his work has been frequently altered in its various foreign language editions to more closely follow the plot of the cult film. “I’ve been dealing with this kind of revision for about 25 years”, concludes the writer.