Watching fans have discovered that scenes from the Marvel Falcon and the Winter Soldier series have been modified by Disney+ to make them less violent. But it would actually be a technical problem and not an act of censorship.
A year after its release on Disney+ and while the dark and violent Moon Knight has just debuted on the platform, the Falcon and the Winter Soldier series worn by Anthony Mackie and Sebastian Stan has undergone some amazing changes. Indeed, Reddit user u/MooninMoulin noticed that two scenes from the third episode were made a little less violent with the wave of a magic wand.
In a combat sequence, Bucky initially impaled one of his opponents on a container with an iron bar, a bar which now bounces off the young woman without lodging in her shoulder as shown in the video below.
The other modification concerns the corpse of Hydra scientist Wilfred Nagel: originally his body was covered in bloodstains and his eyes wide open, whereas in the new version they are now closed and the blood is gone!
If such a late censorship was surprising, especially when we know that the series includes a few other violent scenes such as a murder with a shield of Captain America, it would seem in fact that these modifications were not intended to be put online, at least not in the United States.
“Eagle-eyed fans were right, an episode of Falcon and the Winter Soldier has been edited on Disney+. I heard from a reliable source that it was a control software issue and the wrong file was posted accidentally. This was corrected immediately“, thus tweeted Hollywood Reporter journalist Ryan Parker.
It is possible that this new assembly was intended for another country or for a diffusion in the planes where it is current practice to have sanitized versions of film. But whatever the case, the episode should quickly be put back online as viewers discovered it in March 2021!