In China, a new version of David Fincher’s 1999 film “Fight Club” has sparked a social media firestorm when the original ending was replaced with a terse statement declaring all criminals had been arrested and the police have triumphed.
Tencent Video subscribers blasted the modified conclusion for misrepresenting the original film’s meaning and intent. The nameless narrator kills off his alter ego Tyler Durden and sets off a sequence of explosions that destroy all bank and credit records, resetting the economy, based on Chuck Palahniuk’s novel of the same name. None of this is apparent in the new Chinese adaptation, which portrays Project Mayhem as a failed and foolish effort at crime.
“Through the clue provided by Tyler, the police rapidly figured out the whole plan and arrested all criminals, successfully preventing the bomb from exploding,” the Tencent Video version tells viewers, before adding its own creative twist: “After the trial, Tyler was sent to lunatic asylum receiving psychological treatment.”
A spokesperson for Tencent Holdings declined to comment. The film’s rights were controlled by Pacific Audio & Video Co., an affiliate of state-owned Guangdong TV, and the altered version was approved by the government before being distributed to streaming platforms, according to Vice, which cited an unidentified source familiar with the situation.
“Lord of War,” telling the story of an arms smuggler played by Nicolas Cage, is another U.S. film that has undergone a similar contraction. Streaming viewers in China have complained about its final 30 minutes missing, replaced with white text on a black screen saying “Yuri Orlov confessed all the crimes officially charged against him in court, and was sentenced to life imprisonment in the end.”
Foreign filmmakers have watered down or altered content for years to get past Beijing censors, but it’s rare for entire endings to get reversed—particularly on older films that millions would have seen pirated copies of already.
“When people tell you that the hero of Shawshank ended up in prison again, there’s no explosion in Fight Club, and Nicolas Cage was arrested, you’ll question if your memory exists for real,” said one commentator on China’s Twitter-like Weibo.