The movie Fight Club, starring Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, and Helena Bonham Carter, started to be broadcast on Tencent Video, its YouTube counterpart in China, but the audience protested the situation, seeing that the anarchist and anti-capitalist messages at the end of the movie were blowing up in place.
Normally, at the end of the movie, Norton’s character, The Narrator, kills Pitt’s imaginary alter ego, Tyler Durden, and then he watches the buildings where he planted explosives fall to the ground as part of his plan to overthrow modern civilization.
The ending of Fight Club is very different from the version shown in China. According to this, the Narrator character kills the character Durden, but then a black screen appears and the following statements appear on the screen: “The police, following Tyler’s clues, were quick to realize the plan. They arrested all the criminals and successfully prevented the explosion of the bombs. After the court, Tyler was taken to the mental hospital. He was sent to receive psychological treatment. He was discharged from the hospital in 2012.“
Chinese cinema lovers, who know the original version of the film, are reacting to the situation. One of the users of China’s social media platform Weibo expressed his reaction by saying, “They did not only delete the scenes, but they also added stuff to the script.”
It is not known whether the cuts and additions in question were made by the government or whether they were made by the producers of the film. From time to time, Hollywood studios can make alternative films to bypass China’s censorship and reach millions of Chinese consumers. For example, in the movie, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody‘ in 2019, which is about the life of iconic artist Freddie Mercury, many scenes about Mercury’s sexual life were cut and screened in China.