David Fincher Speaks on China's Change to 'Fight Club' Ending

Fight Club director David Fincher has responded to the film's controversially changed ending on Tencent Video, the Chinese video streaming website owned by Tencent.

Speaking to Empire Magazine, the filmmaker compared the decision to change the ending to the finale of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel, which saw "Jack" enter an institution, “It’s funny to me that the people who wrote the Band-Aid [ending] in China must have read the book, because it adheres pretty closely." “Here’s what we know,” he said. “A company licensed the film from New Regency to show it in China, with a boilerplate [contract]: ‘You have to understand cuts may be made for censhorship purposes.’ No-one said, ‘If we don’t like the ending, can we change it?’ So there’s now a discussion being had as to what ‘trims’ means.”

Fincher added that the licensing made "no sense" to him if the film was going to be changed anyway. “If you don’t like this story, why would you license this movie?” he shared. “It makes no sense to me when people go, ‘I think it would be good for our service if we had your title on it… we just want it to be a different movie.’ The f*cking movie is 20 years old. It’s not like it had a reputation for being super cuddly.”

The film's altered finale did not end in destruction, but rather with a text card that read, “Through the clue provided by Tyler, the police rapidly figured out the whole plan and arrested all criminals, successfully preventing the bomb from exploding. After the trial, Tyler was sent to [a] lunatic asylum receiving psychological treatment. He was discharged from the hospital in 2012.”

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