To make the joke a bit more accessible, Pixar changed the stars and stripes to a spinning globe with fireworks going off behind it. Executives were worried that international audiences wouldn’t be as familiar with the chain, so every mention and logo of Taco Bell was replaced with Pizza Hut. You can check out this video comparing the two versions of the scene. In the US and Canadian release of the British movie, Pride and Prejudice, the ending sees Keira Knightley’s Elizabeth and Matthew Macfadyen’s Mr. Darcy smooching in a classic romance movie ending. But in the UK, purists of the book were not happy. Many considered the kissy ending not only unfaithful to the book (the two never kiss), but also too sexed-up. So the international version of the film had the PDA cut. Rather than cut out the scene completely, a CGI wall was inserted into the scene to cover Ferrell’s tighty whities. This article from the Atlantic dives deeper into the ways Iranian censors cover up certain images, and it contains a screenshot of the CGI wall used in Talladega Nights’ Iranian release. But one of the vegetables most often picked by Japanese kids as the most disgusting is green peppers, so the filmmakers swapped out one vegetable for the other. To make the film more accessible to overseas audiences, a slideshow of images was used to teach some fast facts about the world in which Abraham Lincoln lived. You can check out this opening here. But you might notice that a lot of the references in his book are pretty American (Steve Jobs, Nirvana, I Love Lucy). While plenty of people outside the US would be familiar with these things, Disney knew audiences would connect even more with their own nation’s references. For example, in Russia, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was included in the list. And Dance Dance Revolution was added in the South Korean release due to the game’s popularity in that country. Instead of a moose, these animals were featured in other countries: —Japan: Tanuki —China: Panda —Australia/New Zealand: Koala To help with this unfortunate coincidence, the filmmakers changed the villains to be former members of the Irish Republican Army and gave them all English names. So Hans Gruber became Jack Gruber, who sounds like he should be an action hero in his own movie. The version of The Wolf of Wall Street that was shown in Dubai has a lot of the more graphic images cut out. It was initially assumed that Juma Obaid Al Leem, Director of Media Content at the National Media Council, ordered the cuts to be made. But Al Leem later made a statement that the movie’s distributor, Gulf Films, made the cuts before handing it over to Dubai. Whoever decided to cut down on the movie, must’ve had their work cut out for them. So with both Airplane! and The Concorde… Airport ‘79 being two American films released in the same year, executives thought Kiwi audiences might get the two confused. The newly edited film was played in Germany for some time, but once director Robert Wise found out about the edit, the original version was restored. But the film was further truncated when it came to the Irish release of the film. Scenes in which there is sexual tension between Stanley and Stella were removed for being too horny, and a total of 27 cuts were made. This turned the nuanced story of domestic abuse and manipulation into a confusing movie about a woman getting increasingly frustrated by seemingly nothing. In the ending of Fatal Attraction we all know, Anne Archer’s character shoots Glenn Close’s Alex. But this was shot six months after the film had already wrapped filming. In the original ending, Alex kills herself, making it look like Michael Douglas’ character, Dan, murdered her. Glen Close was apparently not too happy with the updated ending, as it made her character seem far more unhinged and hysteric: “I wasn’t playing a generality, I wasn’t playing a cliché. I was playing a very specific, deeply disturbed, fragile human being, whom I had grown to love.” But in the end, audiences got a wildly different climax. In the final release of 28 Days Later the three surviving characters at the end of the film escape to an idyllic cottage. They are eventually rescued by making a massive banner, but this was not the script’s original finale. In a different version that was filmed, Jim dies in a hospital after Selena and Hannah try to rescue him. While this alternate ending was included in the US printings of the film, they ultimately were not played in theaters. There are even two more endings, neither of which were actually filmed. One reveals that the zombie outbreak was all a dream, and the other sees Jim undergo a blood transfusion to save an infected Frank. But the director decided, “We can’t do this to people, because it was such a tough journey anyway.” So the upbeat ending stayed in the final cut.
