UPDATED 2/7, 10:30 a.m. ET: China has restored the majority of Fight Club’s ending after facing backlash over censorship, per the Hollywood Reporter. The streaming service Tencent has restored 11 minutes from the 12-minute portion that was originally cut.
UPDATED 1/27, 10:55 a.m. ET: Author Chuck Palahniuk offered his thoughts on the news regarding the film adaptation of his novel.
“The irony is that the way the Chinese have changed it, they’ve aligned the ending almost exactly with the ending of the book, as opposed to Fincher’s ending, which was the more spectacular visual ending. So in a way, the Chinese brought the movie back to the book a little bit,” the 59-year-old told TMZ in the clip above.
“A lot of my overseas publishers have edited the novel itself so that the novel ends the way the movie ends,” he added. “So I’ve been dealing with this kind of revision for like 25 years.”
In an installment of his newsletter titled “Have You Seen This Sh*t?”—which he also tweeted out—Chuck Palahniuk wrote, “Tyler and the gang were all arrested. He was tried and sentenced to a mental asylum. How amazing. I’d no idea! Justice always wins. Nothing ever exploded. Fini.”
See original story below.
The ending to David Fincher’s 1999 film Fight Club starring Brad Pitt and Edward Norton has had its iconic ending scene censored in China to a version where the establishment wins.
According to Variety, the largest streaming service in China, Tencent Video, is airing an altered ending of Fight Club where Norton defeats Pitt, playing his alter ego, and buildings begin to crumble around them, signifying that Pitt’s plot to destabilize society worked. In the new version being streamed in China, a title card replaces the shot of skyscrapers collapsing. It 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 [sic] receiving psychological treatment. He was discharged from the hospital in 2012.”
Of course, this strays far from the intended ending of the film, but this is just the latest in China’s history of censorship when it comes to media that challenges the status quo. Variety pointed out that Brad Pitt’s movies were banned from being played in the country after he starred in the film Seven Years in Tibet where he befriends the Dalai Lama after China invades Tibet. That ban was lifted back in 2016.
However, sources in China close to importing foreign films told Variety that this censorship of Fight Club was the best-case scenario.
“This example is kind of genius,” the source said. “They have added something that was not in the original film, and they’ve done so with lettering in the original font so that it fits in believably. It has to have been done in post-production.”
Other examples of Tencent Video censoring foreign films have been them cutting out all gay references from films like Bohemian Rhapsody and Alien: Covenant.
