David Fincher's 1999 cult classic Fight Club is finally officially screening in China, but fans were alarmed to discover that the original ending has been greatly altered.
In the original movie (spoiler warning, I guess), Edward Norton's character, The Narrator, manages to defeat his imaginary alter ego Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) by shooting himself in the head. It's a weird movie, okay?
The film ends with The Narrator watching a series of skyscrapers exploding, suggesting Durden's anarchist plot to bring down capitalist society by destroying the banks was at least a partial success.
Fight Club was officially released in China over the weekend via the Tencent Video streaming platform, and it wasn't long before the movie's unexpected new alternate ending was all over the internet.
In this new edit, The Narrator still beats Durden by shooting himself in the head. However, this is where the film fades to black. Instead of exploding buildings, a message appears in the screen that reads: “The police rapidly figured out the whole plan and arrested all criminals, successfully preventing the bomb from exploding”.
It goes on to claim that Durden - who The Narrator had imagined, don't forget - was sent for psychiatric treatment at a "lunatic asylum", and was finally released in 2012.
Understandably, movie fans in China who will have seen the original version back in the day through pirated copies are more than a little disturbed by this huge change.
“This is too outrageous,” one viewer commented on Tencent Video.
“Fight Club on Tencent Video tells us that they don’t just delete scenes, but add to the plot too,” another added on China’s social media platform Weibo.
Tencent has yet to comment on exactly who ordered these changes to be made, but it's not a huge stretch to imagine that Chinese authorities would want the ending of a movie in which anarchists beat the state to be altered, is it?
Featured Image Credit: 20th Century FoxTopics: TV And Film