The latest James Bond film, Skyfall, launches in China next week after a Beijing premiere held on Wednesday. Its originally scheduled release in November was reportedly delayed to keep the spotlight on domestic productions Back to 1942 and The Last Supper. In the meantime, scenes set in Shanghai and Macau (but filmed in the U.K.) have been softened or cut for Chinese audiences, according to Clarence Tsui at The Hollywood Reporter:
The missing scene was set in Shanghai, when a French hitman (played by Ola Rapace) is shown shooting a Chinese security guard in the elevator lobby of a skyscraper before preparing for an assassination.
Later in the film, in a casino in Macau, Daniel Craig’s Bond questions the story’s femme fatale, Severine (Berenice Marlohe), about whether her tattoo is the result of her being forced into a local prostitution ring at an early age. While the lines remains intact on the soundtrack, the Chinese subtitles suggest the spy is asking her about being coerced into the mob instead.
The film’s Chinese subtitles also fudged the exposition of the back story of the film’s villain, Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem), who tells Bond how he was handed over to the Chinese authorities while working for the MI6 in Hong Kong. He adds that he suffered immense torture at the hands of his interrogators before attempting to kill himself.
Increasingly, content likely to hurt the feelings of the Chinese people is being removed during production, often in consultation with officials.
Bloomberg’s Tim Culpan, meanwhile, reports that genius inventor Tony Stark will be outsourcing some of his gadgets in the forthcoming Iron Man 3:
In a product-placement deal for Paramount Pictures Corp.’s third Iron Man movie, Robert Downey Jr.’s character Tony Stark will battle his latest nemesis, the Mandarin, using TCL’s products. Some real-world features, such as handheld devices interacting with televisions, will be replicated on-screen.
[…] “I believe our new generation of products are as good as those from Samsung and Apple,” Tomson Li, TCL’s chairman and co-founder, said in an interview at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week. “This Iron Man cooperation is very useful for us to promote the TCL brand in the global market, including the U.S. and China.”
To support the marketing effort, Li sealed a deal last week to rename Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Los Angeles as TCL Chinese Theater, buying naming rights for the cultural landmark along the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
