Chinese streamer Tencent Video has reversed its cuts to the ending of David Fincher’s 1999 cult classic and Fight Club has almost been restored to its former glory.
After a lot of widespread backlash to the weird censorship of the film’s ending, Chinese streaming service Tencent Video has restored a lot of the cuts it made to the film’s ending.
Now, the full ending of Fight Club is available in China.
If you have somehow not watched this film and are trying to avoid spoilers, stop reading here.
In the original ending, Edward Norton’s narrator realises that Brad Pitt’s Tyler is actually a version of himself, plotting against him.
Norton manages to defeat Pitt, but he is too slow to save civilization from the bombs he had planted. Norton and Helena Bonham Carter hold hands as buildings explode around them.
And that is the ending.
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In the ending that was originally censored in China, things were quite different.
Norton manages to defeat Pitt, but before the explosions the film ends. Instead, the audience is met with a title card that 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 a lunatic asylum receiving psychological treatment. He was discharged from the hospital in 2012.”
Interesting. Not quite the same as the original ending, right?
Thankfully the ending has been restored.
A key feature of China’s censorship system is that criminals need to be punished for their crimes onscreen and harmony needs to be restored to society.
According to sources that spoke to Variety, it was likely that this was the version of the film that was sold to Chinese distributors to avoid further censorship issues.
The author of the novel, Chuck Palahniuk, wasn’t phased about the censorship itself and said: “The irony is that the way the Chinese have changed it is they’ve aligned with 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 bit.”
The backlash from the edited ending itself appeared to be more troublesome than the content in the film itself, and 11 of the 12 originally cut minutes were restored to the movie. All that was still left out of the film contained nude sex scenes between Brad Pitt and Helena Bonham Carter’s characters.
