Django Unchained

Quentin Tarantino's Oscar-winning film, Django Unchained , has reopened in cinemas in China, a month after it was pulled for supposed technical reasons .

A manager at a UME Cineplex cinema in Beijing said: The new version is one minute shorter than the previous one. He speculated that a nude scene may have been cut.

In a previous round of cuts, the distributor Sony Pictures said Tarantino had agreed to slight adjustments to reduce the violence prior to its initial release in China last month.

Abruptly pulled from cinemas on its original opening day April 11, Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained is poised to return to Chinese screens with its nudity scenes expunged, according to local newspapers and microblogs.

Local media is now claiming a May 7 release after full-frontal nudity was cut. The film's distributor, Sony, has not confirmed the date though.

A post on the TNABO microblog, one of the more authoritative sources of film industry news and statistics in China, said Django Unchained will be returning to the big screens on May 7 after undergoing another round of censorship.

Django Unchained will play in China with the same running time as elsewhere. However Chinese film censors have asked Tarantino to turn down the blood.

Zhang Miao, the director of Sony Pictures' office in China, has announced that Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained has been approved for release in China by the national rating and censorship board, the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television.

In order to get approval for the Chinese release, Tarantino agreed to modify the film's dramatic violence, muting the color of the blood in some sequences and making the spray of the gore less intense.

Zhang said in an interview: 

What we call bloodshed and violence is just a means of serving the purpose of the film, and these slight adjustments will not affect the basic quality of the film -- such as tuning the blood to a darker color, or lowering the height of the splatter of blood.

Update: Cinema release cancelled

12th April 2013. See article from nytimes.com

Django Unchained was abruptly pulled from theaters in China on Thursday, its opening day, a surprising move that underscored the fragility of Hollywood's evolving relationship with the Chinese movie industry. No reason was given for the decision to suspend the release .

Chinese media and film blogs were filled with speculation that the movie had been withdrawn because state censors somehow missed a brief scene with nudity. That explanation seemed unlikely, however, given the careful vetting the film is said to have undergone before it was approved for release.

Whatever the reason, the last-minute nature of the decision was surprising. Potential problems with Chinese censors are usually identified and addressed long before the film's opening.

Tarantino's representatives and financial backers in Los Angeles and New York on Thursday were still scrambling to learn what had gone wrong, and looking for a way to reopen their movie. Sony have indicated that Django Unchained may be rescheduled suggesting that problems could yet be rectified.

The Christian Film & Television Commission, an nutter group in Hollywood, is petitioning the MPAA to change the rating of the 'ultra-violent' new western from Quentin Tarantino, Django Unchained , from R to NC-17. [Note that in UK terms R is a 17A and NC-17 is in fact an 18 rating].

Founder and spokesman Dr. Ted Baehr spouted:

This movie ends with two of the most violent scenes we've ever seen in more than 27 years of reviewing movies. As countless research studies and recent events in Connecticut have shown, some young boys and men like to imitate the violence they see in movies, TV, and video games.

The group claims that the movie shows blood erupting like lava from bodies when people are shot. Also in the movie, a slave is eaten by dogs and a man hanging upside down is threatened with castration.

The group has started a petition calling for the NC-17 rating.