Chinese streaming giant restores original Fight Club ending after outrage

A Chinese streaming giant has restored the original ending of cult film Fight Club after an adapted version sparked outrage.

Last month, viewers clocked that a version of the 1999 movie, available on entertainment platform Tencent Video, did not contain the film's usual closing scenes.

In the ending directed by David Fincher, multiple buildings explode while Edward Norton's character, The Narrator, watches on. The scene suggests The Narrator has made good on his plan to take down modern civilisation.

However, a drastically different version was streamed by Tencent, which reported around 100 million subscribers in 2019. The exploding building scene had been replaced with a black screen, which read: "The police rapidly figured out the whole plan and arrested all criminals, successfully preventing the bomb from exploding."

In a rare censorship reversal, Tencent has begun airing the film with its original ending, according to Agence France-Presse (AFP) reports.

Chinese film fans had originally expressed disdain at the altered ending on social media, while Human Rights Watch described the cuts as "dystopian". Chuck Palahniuk, who wrote the 1996 novel that Fight Club was adapted from, said China had "done the right thing" by restoring the 1999 ending.

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However, his is not the first story that's been censored for Chinese audiences. In 2019, moviegoers who went to see Bohemian Rhapsody, a Freddie Mercury biopic, said scenes referencing the icon's sexuality were either either abruptly muted or cut altogether. Deleted segments include one in which Mercury reveals to his long-time partner that he is not heterosexual. In a scene where Mercury tells the band that he has AIDS, the dialogue goes silent.

Furthermore, China, which has one of the world's biggest box offices, has had success in pressuring American studios into creating alternate film versions by themselves.

The Chinese version of Iron Man 3, released in 2013, featured popular Chinese actress Fan Bingbing, despite her being absent from the version shown abroad. Additionally, lengthy clips of Chinese scenery were spliced into the blockbuster.