Neon has pulled its body horror film Together from theaters in China after a local distributor censored a same-sex wedding scene.
Starring real-life married couple Dave Franco and Alison Brie, Together tells the story of a fictional married couple whose bodies start to slowly fuse into one being as a commentary on codependency. According to The Wrap, the film featured a same-sex wedding that proved pivotal to the plot:
The altered scene is a key one in the film’s plot, as Brie’s character discovers that a person they met in the town has undergone the fusion process with his husband.
But thanks to AI-generated alterations made by Hishow, the version seen in China makes the fused couple a heterosexual one, replacing one of the men in the videotape of the wedding and subsequent fusion with a woman.
Neon bought “Together” at the Sundance Film Festival for $15 million and sold Chinese distribution rights to Hishow as part of the film’s foreign sales process. Hishow pulled the film from theaters at Neon’s request.
Neon said in a statement that it did not authorize Hishow’s edit of the film.
“Neon does not approve of Hishow’s unauthorized edit of the film and have demanded they cease distributing this altered version,” the statement said.
This is far from the first time China has edited a movie without approval from the filmmakers. In 2022, for instance, the communist regime China censored the ending to the 1999 movie Fight Club by having the government authorities solve everything. As Breitbart News reported at the time:
At the end of the acclaimed David Fincher classic, Edward Norton watches the buildings of several major credit card companies collapse underneath a cataclysmic explosion set by his alter-ego Tyler Durden, thereby erasing the debt record and plunging consumer America into chaos … but you wouldn’t know it if watching in China.
According to a report from Vice, the Chinese streaming site Tencent Video completely removed the explosion at the end of the movie and instead has the screen cut to black as a caption informs the audience what “really” happened.
“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 reportedly says. “After the trial, Tyler was sent to lunatic asylum receiving psychological treatment. He was discharged from the hospital in 2012.”
The censorship recalled that of the Tencent Video version of the 2005 Nicolas Cage thriller Lord of War, which was also made over in favor of a more government-friendly happy ending.
“The Tencent Video version, which is about 30 minutes shorter than the original, replaces the ending with a new caption, saying the arms dealer ‘confessed all the crimes officially charged against him in court, and was sentenced to life imprisonment in the end,’” noted Vice.
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