10 Movies That Made No Sense If You Watched Them In Other Countries
1. China Changed The Protagonist From Chinese-American To Chinese - 21 & Over
One of the strangest phenomena in recent years has been the tendency for certain Hollywood movies to film additional scenes to be inserted into the Chinese release.
Surely most famously, Iron Man 3's Chinese cut featured a much larger role for Dr. Wu (Wang Xueqi), and while this is easier to understand for a mega-budget blockbuster, it's tougher to make sense of on a low-budget movie like 2013's raunchy comedy 21 & Over.
Outside of China, 21 & Over follows Jeff Chang (Justin Chon), a 21-year-old Chinese-American college student who embarks on a night of drunken debauchery with his friends (Miles Teller and Skylar Astin).
Like the glut of post-Hangover knockoffs released throughout the early 2010s, it was a relatively forgettable sex comedy that just came and went.
For China, though, the film was re-shaped during production, with additional bookending scenes being shot and edits being made to change Jeff from Chinese-American to a Chinese student briefly transferring to an American college.
Edits also altered the film's tone significantly, reconfiguring it as an earnest, not-much-raunchy warning about Western excess, which ends with Jeff going back to China and rejecting those empty-headed American ways.
Ultimately this all came about because distributor Relativity Media brokered a lucrative deal with various Chinese companies to help co-fund the film.
Co-director Scott Moore was relatively diplomatic about the changes, though also acknowledged that while he wrote the extra Chinese scenes, he had no authority over how they were dubbed for the Chinese release:
"I think it just comes with the territory - if you want to release it in China, they get to spin it however they want... They dub it all anyway, so whatever dialogue we all wrote that's in English, we don't actually know what the Chinese version says."
Few outside of China have actually seen the regionalised edit, though it's incredibly difficult to imagine how such a relentlessly over-the-top film could be comfortably edited into something that appeals to more "traditional" Chinese audiences.