This is one of the mythical scenes of popular cinema: Edward Norton, rid of his evil double played by Brad Pitt, watches the skyscrapers of the Los Angeles business center explode. But the young Chinese who would discover fight club for the first time on the Tencent Video platform, since this weekend, twenty-three years after its release, are entitled to another version: instead of the scene celebrating anarchy by shattering symbols of finance, they see a simple message appear, while the film has stopped a few seconds earlier: ” Using evidence provided by Tyler, the police quickly uncovered the project, arrested all the criminals, and stopped the bombs from going off. After a trial, Tyler was sent to an asylum to receive psychiatric treatment. He was released from hospital in 2012. So much for David Fincher’s film with the sauce of Chinese political correctness.
While scissoring in foreign films is nothing new in China, censors show that they aren’t afraid to take their audiences for fools, as the rewritten conclusion is out of step with the rest of the film. What Chinese Internet users have not failed to note, shocked by the absurdity of the approach. ” The whole team ofOcean’s Eleven would probably have been arrested. And the whole family Godfather would have ended up in jail “, quips a user of the social network Weibo, similar to Twitter. Others point out that these practices push the Chinese public to pirate the original versions of foreign films, rather than going to legally watch the planed versions offered by Chinese platforms such as Tencent Video or iQiyi (Baidu’s platform).
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This kind of practice is common for films, but the operation usually takes place before their release. Example with Infernal Affairsa Hong Kong thriller that tells a story of undercover agents between gangs and police, and whose Infiltrators, by Martin Scorsese, is inspired. ” When the movie comes out Infernal Affairs [en 2002], two versions of the ending were shot: one for Hong Kong, and one for mainland China. In the original version, the policeman dies at the end of the film. In the Chinese version, the police discover that Andy Lau was undercover and he is arrested”explains Grace Leung, lecturer at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, specialist in the regulation of media and cinema.
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