The 1999 film Fight Club was recently made available in China with an altered ending more in line with the authoritarian polices of the government there. However, author Chuck Palahniuk, whose 1996 book was the basis of the American film, told TMZ that the edited version is actually closer to the original text than David Fincher’s version.
The film is streaming on the Chinese platform Tencent Video, almost two decades after its release.
In the original ending, the narrator, played by Edward Norton, kills Brad Pitt’s character, Tyler Durden, and watches a cluster of skyscrapers blow up as a symbol of destroying consumerism by erasing bank and debt records.
This explosion scene has been removed in the edited version in China, and replaced with a screen 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.”
Palahniuk’s initial response to the edit was a tweet that read, “This is SUPER wonderful! Everyone gets a happy ending in China!”
Speaking to TMZ on Thursday, Palahniuk said, “The irony is that 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.”
When asked why he seemed not too bothered about the edit, the author noted that he has been used to censorship for a while now with his books heavily banned throughout the US. “But it’s only an issue when China changes the end of a movie. I have been putting up with book banning for a long time,” Palahniuk said, and added that he has also been dealing with revisions made by overseas publishers in order to align his book with the film’s ending.
However, Chinese fans of the film expressed their resentment towards the edits.
“This is too ridiculous,” wrote one person on Tencent Video’s page for the movie, as per a CNN report, while another called the change “a pillar of shame in cinematic history.”
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“No one wants to pay money to watch a classic that has been so ruined to such an extent,” yet another person wrote on Douban, a movie review site.
China is infamous for its strict regulation of the entertainment sector by censoring content that does not align with the country’s ideology, preventing or delaying the release of Hollywood films, and imposing curbs on Chinese celebrities’ social media footprints in a bid to preserve mainstream values. Multiple recent Hollywood films such as Spider-Man: No Way Home, Black Widow, and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings are notably still awaiting a China release.