Censors have altered the recent animated film “Minions: The Rise of Gru” for domestic release in China, social media users across the country noted over the weekend.
The edit is another example of Chinese authorities editing a popular Hollywood film to make it more politically correct, causing some viewers to lament the changes.
According to posts and screenshots from the film shared on Weibo, a platform similar to Twitter, censors faced an addendum in which Wild Knuckles, the main character of the heist film, is caught by the police and sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Gru, a co-conspirator of Wild Knuckles, “returns to his family” and “his greatest achievement is being a father to his three daughters,” screenshots from the film revealed.
In the international version, the film ends with Gru and Wild Knuckles, the two anti-thief heroes of the story, after Wild Knuckles fakes his own death to avoid being caught by the authorities.
Numerous online commentators derided the appendix, saying it resembled a PowerPoint presentation.
DuSir, an online movie review publisher with 14.4 million followers on Weibo, noted that the Chinese version of the film runs one minute longer than the international version and questioned why the extra minute was needed.
“Only we need special guidance and care for fear that a cartoon will ‘corrupt’ us,” Dusser wrote in a piece published Saturday.
Universal Pictures, the film’s US distributor, did not respond to a request for comment outside normal business hours.
The film’s distributor in China is Huaxia Film Distribution Co. and China Film Co. did not respond to a request for comment.
China places a quota on the number of foreign films shown in domestic cinemas. Many Hollywood films released in the country have certain scenes omitted or altered.
Sometimes, some viewers notice, the alternate endings of the movies deviate too far from the original.
Last year, Chinese viewers of the classic 1999 film “Fight Club” noticed that the original ending, in which the protagonist and his alter ego smash a set of skyscrapers, was not in the version shown on domestic streaming site Tencent Video.
Instead, the onscreen script states that the police “quickly discovered the entire plan and arrested all the perpetrators, successfully preventing the bomb from detonating.”
The changes were widely derided among Chinese fans of the original film, and drew backlash from the film’s director and the author of the novel it was based on. Tencent later restored the original ending.