There was just too much Jamie Foxx in Django Unchained for China.
Authorities have reportedly shut down screenings of Quentin Tarantino’s bloody spaghetti western one minute into its debut, even after a major marketing campaign and several edits by the filmmakers to tone down the bloodshed.
“‘Django’ screenings have been postponed and we can’t guarantee when they will be resumed,” said a spokesperson for Beijing’s Sanlitun Megabox theater.
This would have been Tarantino’s first film to be released in China. Cultural authorities restrict the number of foreign films in theaters each year, but claimed the movie had been postponed for “technical reasons.”
However, many are speculating that a torture scene in which Jamie Foxx goes full-frontal nude may have set off the censorship alarm.
But prominent film critic, Wei Xidi, told the New York Times it’s unlikely that was the reason because a scene like that would never make it past the brutal censorship process
“This film, like all Chinese films, has gone through a censorship process and has been edited for a Chinese audience,” said Xidi. “Because it has gone through this process, it doesn’t make sense that it would be halted all of a sudden on the night of its premiere.”
The real reason Django Unchained was pulled may never be known, but this film is one the Chinese people shouldn’t miss out on, so hopefully Sony Pictures and Tarantino can work things out with the Chinese government.
