8 Times Movie Censorship Backfired

2. The Whole Movie Gets Recut - Pulp Fiction

Pulp Fiction Ending
Miramax

One of the weirdest movie beefs has to be the one between Lebanese distributor Italia Film and Quentin Tarantino.

Italia Film has been distributing the writer/director's films in Lebanon for the past three decades and is prone to cutting vast swathes of them before they hit theatres. As per The New Arab, Italia Film cut key portions from The Hateful Eight and Kill Bill - reportedly due to concerns over their length more than anything else.

This is unusual in and of itself - typically, censorship is implemented to remove offending content, rather than because of a subjective critique over length or presentation - but it doesn't even take the cake for the weirdest change implemented by Italia Film for one of Tarantino's movies. That honour goes to Pulp Fiction, which was re-edited in chronological order for its Lebanese release thanks to the company thinking its non-linear presentation was a mistake with the reels.

Less overt censorship than a distributor simply overstepping the mark, the story of Pulp Fiction's mangled linear cut is tragically funny.

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.