8 Times Movie Censorship Backfired

4. Florence Pugh's CGI Dress - Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer Florence Pugh Jean Tatlock
Universal Pictures

Director Christopher Nolan's latest effort, Oppenheimer, marks a number of firsts for the director. It's the first movie where he's recreated a nuclear explosion, the first where he's used Cillian Murphy as a lead, and also his first to feature some full-on nudity. Murphy and Florence Pugh share a number of love scenes in the film as the eponymous physicist and Communist activist Jean Tatlock respectively, with the latter going fully topless for each of them.

Full nudity tends to lead to a film getting an R-rating from the MPAA or a 15 by the BBFC. However, certain countries in the Middle East and Asia can often request that the offending content either be edited or removed in order to be considered for release. For Oppenheimer, securing a release in India and several Middle East countries meant both editing large chunks of the love scenes and for Pugh to be shrouded in a CGI dress for the scene where she and Murphy are sat on opposite chairs following a heated rendezvous.

It didn't take long for said dress to go viral on social media, with the computer-generated garment looking totally unconvincing.

Hilariously though, this isn't even the worst case of animation being used to cover up on-screen nudity.

Content Producer/Presenter

WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.