Chinese Censorship Changes Ending of ‘Minions 2: Rise of Gru’

Chinese censors altered the ending of the recent animated film “Minions 2: Origin of Gru” for its domestic release in China social media users across the country claimed over the weekend.

The move is yet another example of Chinese officials editing a popular film by Hollywood to make it “more politically correct,” leading some viewers to bemoan the changes.

According to posts and screenshots from the film shared on Weibo, a platform similar to Twitter, censors placed an addendum in which Wild Knuckles, a character in the heist film, was caught by police and served 20 years in prison.

Gru, a co-conspirator of Wild Knuckles, “has returned to his family” and “his greatest accomplishment is being the father of three daughters,” screenshots from the film showed.

In the international version, the film ends with Gru and Wild Knuckles, the two anti-heroes in the story, riding together after Wild Knuckles faked his own death to avoid capture by the authorities.

Several online commentators scoffed at the addendum, saying it resembled a slideshow.

China imposes a quota on the number of foreign films that can be shown in domestic cinemas. Many Hollywood films that are shown in the country have certain scenes omitted or altered.

Sometimes, viewers note that alternate endings of films diverge greatly 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 blast through a skyscraper set, was not in the version shown on domestic streaming site Tencent. Video.

Instead, an on-screen script said that the police “quickly uncovered the entire plan and arrested all the criminals, successfully preventing the bomb from exploding.”

The changes were widely derided among Chinese fans of the original film, and even provoked responses from the film’s director and the author of the work it was based on. Tencent later restored the original ending.