Repressive societies can block, hinder or outright eradicate creative works for any number of reasons. North Korea likely hacked Sony due to The Interview, and, now, in China, authorities there adjusted Minions: The Rise of Gru to stop decadence somehow.
An article published by The Guardian today reveals censors changed the ending to the Steve Carell cartoon to note Wild Knuckles, a character in the film’s plot, was caught by the police and served 20 years in jail. According to the addendum, Carell’s Gru returned to his family and his biggest accomplishment is being a father to his children. In the rest of the world, the pair go off together after one fakes their death to avoid captivity. DuSir, a critic on the Chinese social-networking website Weibo, blasted the move as a very ridiculous one.
“It’s only us who need special guidance and care for fear that a cartoon will ‘corrupt’ us.”
Distributors of the project in the country, which has active internment camps, did not respond to requests for comment from The Guardian. This kind of thing is common in China. The nation has a strict limit on the number of foreign films it allows to be shown to its citizens, and in and outside of cinemas, they are often heavily altered for domestic consumption. This happened with Fight Club earlier this year on the Tencent Video streaming platform – though this appears to have been a case of self-censorship on the part of the company as the original ending was later restored – and the U.S. government-owned Voice of America reported earlier this year such censorship has expanded to a bigger scale than it has had in the past couple of decades.
There is no word on if Minions: The Rise of Gru will have its ending restored at this time.