‘Fight Club’: China changes cult classic movie’s explosive ending to make the authorities win
“Fight Club” is: Don’t mess with the ending of the 1999 cult classic starring Brad Pitt and Edward Norton.
But China has its own rules and has drastically changed director David Fincher’s anarchistic, apocalyptical finale.
CNN Business’ Beijing bureau reports that Chinese fans were enraged over the weekend when they noticed the version of “Fight Club” available on the country’s popular streaming platform Tencent Video features a revised ending in which the authorities win over the original mayhem.
The edit, which comes more than two decades after the film’s original release, has prompted criticism far beyond disgruntled movie fans. The advocacy group Human Rights Watch tweeted that the changed ending was “dystopian.”
Brad Pitt admits: He’s forgotten the first rule of ‘Fight Club’
“Fight Club” features Norton’s unnamed character starting the brawling “Fight Club” with Brad Pitt’s charismatic Tyler Durden. The randomly violent group transforms to an anti-materialistic movement called Project Mayhem.
In the original ending, Norton’s narrator discovers that Durden was actually his own violent imaginary alter ego and kills him off. The movie closes with Norton (with his self-inflicted gunshot wound) staring out of office windows with his girlfriend (Helena Bonham Carter) as buildings detonate – Durden’s final incendiary push against consumerism.
CNN Business and the BBC report that the new ending erases the entire explosive final scene. The mayhem has been replaced with text onscreen telling audiences that authorities arrived just in time to save the day.
“Through the clue provided by Tyler, the police rapidly figured out the whole plan and arrested all criminals, successfully preventing the bomb from exploding,” the caption reads. “After the trial, Tyler was sent to (a) lunatic asylum receiving psychological treatment. He was discharged from the hospital in 2012.”
Author Chuck Palahniuk, who wrote the 1996 novel “Fight Club” that was adapted for the screen, tweeted sarcastically about the change.
“This is SUPER wonderful!” he wrote. “Everyone gets a happy ending in China!”
In a follow-up tweet, Palahniuk decried U.S. censorship of “Fight Club,” stating his novel is banned in the Texas prison system. “Is that censorship? Or can only China censor things?” he tweeted. “Please hit me back.”
During an interview with TMZ, Palahniuk said he has dealt with this type of government revision throughout his career. Ironically, he noted, “the way the Chinese changed it, they aligned the ending almost exactly to the ending of the book. So in a way, the Chinese brought the movie back to the book a little bit.”