China Censors Ending of New 'Minions' Movie
The ending of the popular new film Minions: The Rise of Gru has been changed by Chinese censors, according to reports on social media.
Movie fans in China posted photos of the ending and wrote about it on Chinese social media sites Weibo and WeChat.
According to the posts, in the new ending, the villain Wild Knuckles is sent to prison for 20 years, while the main character Gru — a young villain himself — returns to his family and becomes a good guy.
However, in the original version, the film ends with the two characters escaping the police after Wild Knuckles fakes his own death. Some people also noticed that the Chinese version is one minute longer than the original.
These changes aren't the first reports of China censoring Hollywood movies.
It was also reported that parts of the 2018 movie Bohemian Rhapsody had been cut from its original version before being played to Chinese audiences.
And this year, people watching the 1999 Hollywood movie Fight Club on Tencent Video — one of China's largest video sites — noticed that the ending had been changed. Instead of the film's main characters watching buildings explode from a window, the screen shows a message explaining that the police stopped the buildings from exploding and arrested everyone.
China only allows a certain number of international films to be shown in its theaters every year. The country had the world's largest film market in 2021 — while theaters in many parts of the world were closed because of the coronavirus pandemic — but it only allowed 20 Hollywood films to be shown in its theaters that year.
