10 Films That Were Totally Changed For Foreign Audiences

7. Iron Man Comes With Extra Chinese

There are two versions of Iron Man 3 out there. There's the regular, international cut that we've all seen and totally dug, the freewheeling spirit of the first two movies and the Avengers taken and ran with by writer/director Shane Black (best known for scripting the witty buddy cop movies of the eighties, including Lethal Weapon) and delivering a hilarious-yet-heartfelt third entry in the blockbuster superhero franchise. This version has Tony Stark defeating Guy Pearce's villainous Aldrich Killian, with help from love interest Pepper Potts and a whole mess of experimental robot suits of armour. It's awesome. Then there's the version that got released in China, which is a little different. For years movies have had to make insane cuts and edits in order to get an official Chinese release, but in recent years Hollywood have been going even further to placate what's become the second biggest movie market in the world. This has included such moves as digitally changing the enemies in the Red Dawn remake from Chinese to North Korean - after filming had long since wrapped - and, in the case of Iron Man 3, shoehorning in a whole subplot and characters not seen in the regular version of the film. If you saw Iron Man 3 in China you would have seen a whole four minutes of footage not included in any other release, where Chinese medical professional Dr Wu keeps a close track on the film's story and intervenes when Tony needs some more shrapnel taken out of his chest, giving a minor plot twist and a few shots of Chinese celebrity Fan Bingbing as the doctor's assistant during the procedure (which involves acupuncture, natch). Then Iron Man shakes Wu's hand amongst a group of school kids and flies off, back to the rest of the film. It's weird. But it worked, making $95.2 million in the country on its opening weekend.