When Minions: The Rise of Gru premiered, we all knew the storyline would follow his teenage years and his evolution into becoming a supervillain in the series, however, Chinese authorities disagreed and decided to change the ending of the movie in order to turn Gru into a good guy.
The movie, which has just been released this weekend in China, changed its ending to suggest that Gru’s mentor, Wild Knuckles, was indeed jailed and Gru became a good guy and, eventually, a great father to three lovely girls, as we know since the first movie.
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Screenshots of the altered movie ending were shared on the Chinese microblogging site Weibo and showed how censors added a series of subtitled still images into the credits sequence.
They explain that Wild Knuckles was caught and in jail for 20 years after a failed heist, while Gru “returned to his family” to later become a father to his three girls, being this his “biggest accomplishment”.
DuSir, a popular movie blogger with more than 14 million followers on Weibo, wrote an article questioning this government decision and questioning why Chinese people needed “special guidance”, according to the BBC.
“How weak and lacking judgment do they think our audiences are?” he asked.
Some even proposed that this series of changes were done to align with the government’s new policy that encourages its citizens to have three children in order to raise the country’s birth rate.
Despite the altered ending, the movie became one of the most successful at the box office, with a grossing pandemic record of about 21.74m yuan ($3.2m) on its opening day in China, according to Deadline.
Minions: The Rise of Gru has not been the only movie to be altered to fit into the Chinese government policies. A version of 1999 Fight Club was changed in order to remove the scene where the protagonist blew several skyscrapers and instead they replaced it with a message saying that authorities had won and saved the day.
After complaints even from the director David Fincher and the author Chuck Palahniuk, the decision was reversed but kept the nudity scenes censored.
