Since the news broke that Tencent Video had released a version of Fight Club with a censored ending in China, the original ending has been restored. Initially, twelve minutes of footage was edited from the movie, but eleven minutes of that missing footage has now been restored. A minute of the Chinese version remains on the cutting room floor, mainly consisting of a sex scene featuring Brad Pitt and Helena Bonham Carter that contains nudity. The ending has been fully restored, however.
The original version of David Fincher’s Fight Club ends with Edward Norton’s character killing Tyler Durden — his alter ego played by Pitt. Then, Bonham Carter‘s Marla Singer is escorted into the building where Norton‘s The Narrator is holed up, and the two hold hands and watch from a large window as buildings collapse around the city. The ending that was first released in China on the streaming service Tencent Video has the footage that the film is supposed to end with entirely removed and replaced with text that reads:
“Through the clue provided by Tyler, 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.”
Fans all over the world were outraged at the removal of the ending and expressed themselves through various outlets online. Surprisingly, one person who didn’t seem to have much of a problem with the censorship is the author of the novel that Fincher‘s film was based on, Chuck Palahniuk. Palahniuk stated that China’s censored version of the film contained an ending that had a lot more similarities with the climax of his 1996 novel than Fincher‘s initial vision. Fight Club the novel ends with the bombs planted by Project Mayhem not detonating and The Narrator being put in a mental hospital after shooting himself and surviving.
Palahniuk spoke to TMZ on the matter and said:
“The irony is that the way the Chinese have changed it is 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.”
On January 25, The Cyberspace Administration of China declared that they would be administering an effort to “clean” the web, which would last a month. The intent was to ensure that the internet was a “civilized and healthy” place for the Lunar New Year. Today, Tencent Video‘s version of Fight Club that is currently available to stream in China has been almost fully restored, and it would be easy to assume that the international outcry over censorship had something to do with it.
via Collider