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What could be so offensive about some yellow villain cartoons playing around? Well, for the Chinese censors, a lot can be wrong. Minions: The Rise of Gru is the latest foreign movie to face the Chinese censors.
China has changed the ending to the blockbuster Hollywood animated film Minions: The Rise of Gru, the sequel to earlier installments of the Minions and Despicable Me movies.
The original: Minions: The Rise of Gru is a heist film and ends with Gru and Wild Knuckles, a supervillain, riding off together after Wild Knuckles fakes his death to escape arrest.
The China change: However, the ending of the movie has been changed for Chinese viewers. The Chinese version of the film is a minute longer where pictures of the characters appear with text that tells the story of what happened to the characters after their heist. Apparently, Wild Knuckles is arrested by the police and serves 20 years in jail for trying to steal the Zodiac Stone. While Gru returns to his family and his greatest achievement is being a father to his three daughters.
The screenshots of the Chinese ending of the film were shared on Weibo, a Chinese Twitter-like platform, where netizens complained that the additions looked like a PowerPoint presentation. They also questioned whether the Chinese Communist Party really thought that some yellow funny cartoonish villains would ‘corrupt’ people.
Minions: The Rise of Gru is evidently not the only film to face the Chinese cut. Here are 8 other movies and a show that also faced the axe:
1. THE SIMPSONS
Some of the episodes of the animated series The Simpsons were completely removed on Disney+ in Hong Kong. These episodes mocked the CCP’s stance on Tiananmen Square (the site of deadly democracy protests in 1989 China), Mao Zedong, and Tibet, among other things. It is unknown whether the streaming service self-censored or was ordered to remove the episodes.
2. FIGHT CLUB
The 1999 hit film Fight Club’s ending faced the Chinese censors on the Tencent video streaming platform and viewers and fans were not happy about it. In the original ending of the film, the protagonist kills his alter ego and also blows up some skyscrapers. But in the Chinese ending of the film, the skyscrapers blowing up scenes were axed and replaced with the text that reads:
“The police rapidly figured out the whole plan and arrested all criminals, successfully preventing the bomb from exploding. After the trial, Tyler was sent to lunatic asylum receiving psychological treatment. He was discharged from the hospital in 2012.”
However, in a rare exception, the original ending was restored by Tencent after a backlash.
3. PIXELS
The 2015 Adam Sandler film, Pixels, was also altered to ensure that the movie got released in China. This is yet another case of self-censorship rather than Chinese censorship. The original movie includes a scene where aliens poke a hole through the Great Wall. This scene was removed for Chinese viewers in an act of self-censorship.
4. MISSION IMPOSSIBLE 3
The Tom Cruise movie, Mission Impossible 3, was partly shot in Shanghai. Reports said that China wanted the filmmakers to cut out scenes that showed laundry hanging on the streets of the city because the country wanted to show itself as modern and not hanging laundry in the balconies. Other than the laundry scenes, some scenes in which Tom Cruise’s character kills two Chinese henchmen and a Chinese woman is held hostage were also cut.
5. IRON MAN 3
Iron Man 3 went out of its way to appease the Chinese authorities by making a villainous character with Chinese ethnic origins ambiguous in identity. The villain known as The Mandarin is originally a character belonging to a Chinese family, but in the censored version, the character is given ambiguous ethnic background and the character is even played by a white actor.
6. LOOPER
Looper was already a risky movie for release in China as the authorities there hate time-travel plots. But Looper made it to the Chinese market by playing to the tune of the authorities. Part of the film is shot in Shanghai which is shown as a clean and vibrant metropolis in contrast to a dystopian Kansas City in the US, where the main action takes place.
7. RED DAWN
Red Dawn originally came out in 1984 and was remade in 2012 with lots of changes. The premise of either of the films shows the US being invaded by a foreign country. In 1984, this country was the communist Soviet Union. For the 2012 remake, makers first thought of China as the invading country keeping up with the changing geopolitics. But later in the process, Chinese flags were altered to that of North Korean flags, after the makers recognised the Chinese market as substantial
8. TITANIC
Remember the iconic scene in Titanic where Jack paints a nude Rose? Well, that scene was never shown to Chinese viewers as the censors thought it was obscene. China already has a wide ban on pornographic content and doesn’t even allow nudity for artistic purposes.
9. SKYFALL
The James Bond movie in which the British spy is seen defeating several men of Chinese origin was entirely cut in the Chinese version of the movie.
The China Cut
China allows only a handful of foreign films to be shown in its domestic theatres. For several Hollywood studios, China is a massive market that can mean a difference between profit and loss. Since the time China opened up its market to the outside world, it has dictated what foreign films can be shown to the Chinese viewers. The censors don’t only limit to political issues pertaining to China, but also small things like laundry on the balcony, thieves escaping in a heist film, ghosts, religion, etc.
Some films don’t even make the cut and are outright banned. But the arm of the Chinese censors also doesn’t only limit themselves to movies released in mainland China. Sometimes, the authorities punish studios themselves and ban them in China if they show China or Chinese politics in poor light outside of its borders. The same happened to Disney in 1997, when the company was banned for making a movie, Kundun, on Tibet and the Dalai Lama.
Studios have started to push back against Chinese censorship now. But it needs to be seen who will crumble to whose pressure and whether the world will be watching movies approved by the Chinese authorities.
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