The animated film “Minions 2: The Rise of Gru” premiered this Friday in Chinese theaters — with a duration of 88 minutes, instead of the 87 of the original version, fans of the saga that began in 2010 did not take long to realize and report on the Weibo social network, a kind of Chinese Twitter.
Instead of the Universal Studios ending, in which pre-teen supervillain Gru realizes his mentor faked his own death to evade the police and happily runs away with him and his army of minions, Chinese censorship he has wrought his own end. . An ending in which Gru, the most evil villain on the planet, becomes good, precisely in the film in which the origin of the character is intended to be revealed.
According to Chinese fans of the saga, quoted by Reuters, here is the alternate ending of “The Rise of Gru”, added in the style of a “PowerPoint presentation”: Wild Knuckles, the mentor of young Gru, is caught by the police and sentenced to death 20 years in prison; Gru returns to his family and his greatest achievement in his life is “being the father of his three daughters”.
A Weibo user sarcastically remarked, in a comment posted on Saturday in response to a question about the film’s extension in China: “It was only because we need special guidance and care, fearing that a cartoon will ‘corrupt’ us.”
For Reuters, neither Universal Studios nor those responsible for distributing the film in that country commented on the incorporation into the film, one of the biggest box office successes worldwide this summer, which even gave rise to a trend on TikTok—going to the movie in a group, fully clothed and with a banana in hand—but banned from several UK and US cinemas.
It is not uncommon in China for movies shown to be censored, in theaters and beyond. At the beginning of the year, the change in the ending of Fight Club (from 1999) in the transmission of Tecent, China’s largest Internet company. Instead of bombing a series of skyscrapers in Los Angeles, the film ended with a written note explaining that the police “quickly discovered the entire plan and arrested all the criminals, successfully stopping the bomb blast.”
At that time, Chuck Palahniuk, author of the book that gave rise to the film, did not hold back and commented on the case on his Twitter account: “This is SUPER wonderful! In China everyone has a happy ending!” A month later, thanks to the controversy generated by the change, the original version had been restored.
Source: Observadora
