Fight Club is back to its full, uncut glory in the Middle Kingdom. Days after removing the film’s explosive final scene due to censorship regulations in China, Chinese streamer Tencent Video has restored the film’s unaltered ending. In late January, Tencent replaced the ending—one showing the collapse and destruction of buildings around the city—with a cue card saying anarchist Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) was arrested and sent to a mental hospital.
Chinese censorship rules say all criminals shown on-screen must always be punished for their crimes and in the uncut version of Fight Club, Durden clearly is not. “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,” Tencent’s censored ending first read.
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Fight Club is based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk, who commented the censored version, ironically enough, was closer to the book than the film version from David Fincher.
“The irony is that the way the Chinese have changed it is 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,” the writer said in an interview with TMZ last month. “So in a way, the Chinese brought the movie back to the book a little bit.”
“What I find really interesting is that my books are heavily banned throughout the U.S.,” he added. “The Texas prison system refuses to carry my books in their libraries. A lot of public schools and most private schools refuse to carry my books. But it’s only an issue once China changes the end of a movie? I’ve been putting up with book banning for a long time.”
All and all, he’s not all too bothered by the censorship anyway, considering the book itself has long been censored or altered in international locales.
“A lot of my overseas publishers have edited the novel so the novel ends the way the movie ends,” Palahniuk concluded. “So I’ve been dealing with this kind of revision for like 25 years.”
Fight Club is now streaming on Prime Video.
