10 Movies Weirdly Changed In Foreign Countries
5. Total Recall, The Departed And Iron Man 3 All Suffered From China Syndrome
In case you haven't noticed, China is particularly sensitive when it comes to how their country is represented in film and what information about their people is made public. As a result, numerous films from the U.S., when hitting the Chinese market, are drastically altered.
Len Wiseman's toothless PG-13 Total Recall remake was set between the only two inhabitable place on earth in the future: New Asia and The United Federation of Britain. However, studio executives feared New Asia's working class environment may have reflected negatively on China's reputation as a world leader, so New Asia was simply renamed The Colony.
A major plot point of The Departed, itself a remake of a Hong Kong cop thriller, concerned stolen microprocessors that can be used to guide missiles, to which Martin Sheen's character remarks that we'll be at war with China within a decade. This line, and the implication that Beijing wanted to illegally purchase microprocessors, led to The Departed never reaching the mainland.
But other films anticipated problems with the Chinese market. Marvel, in particular, took care to cater to their Asian fans with Iron Man 3 by adding a scene in which Dr. Wu, a minor character, is given more scenes and his assistant played by Chinese actress Li Bingbing also got more screentime. Overall, the Chinese Iron Man 3 is four minutes longer than the U.S. cut.