Chinese authorities have cancelled screenings of Django Unchained on the morning of its release, despite weeks of publicity for the blockbuster spaghetti western.
Media authorities claimed the Quentin Tarantino film, scheduled for release on Thursday, had been postponed for "technical reasons", but unofficial news websites reported that the real reason was a scene showing full-frontal male nudity.
"Django screenings have been postponed and we can't guarantee when they will be resumed," said a woman at the Sanlitun Megabox theatre in Beijing.
According to a widely circulated post on the Sina Weibo social media site, the cinema's first showing of the film had been under way for about one minute when management pulled the plug.
"After watching it for about a minute, it stopped!" said microblogger Xue Yi Dao. "Staff then came in and said [film censors] … had called to say it had to be delayed!! Can someone tell me what's happening!!"
The government-owned Shanghai United Circuit issued an emergency notice requiring the city's cinemas to halt screenings of the film and grant refunds to ticketholders, according to an article on the Sohu website.
Another site, Sina, cited an industry insider as saying the postponement was related to a nude scene featuring the film's lead actor, Jaime Foxx.
Tarantino, Django Unchained's director, had already reined in the movie's gore for the Chinese market, retouching footage to tone down the colour and bloodshed.
"What we call bloodshed and violence is just a means of serving the purpose of the film, and these slight adjustments will not affect the basic quality of the film," the director of Sony Pictures' China branch, Zhang Miao, told the Southern Metropolis Daily newspaper.
Django Unchained is Tarantino's first film to be released in China, where cultural authorities restrict the number of foreign films in cinemas each year.
Despite the edits, Django Unchained was set to run for its full 165 minutes. In contrast, the Chinese release of Skyfall lost an entire scene in which James Bond kills a security guard in Shanghai. Meanwhile, censors reduced Cloud Atlas by nearly 40 minutes, primarily because of its graphic sex scenes.
Many online commenters were perplexed by the cancellations because the film had passed China's notoriously opaque pre-screening censorship process. Censors' "cutting hands are fiercer than that of a slaveowner, insistent on making Django a eunuch", wrote one, according to Agence France Presse.
Bootleg DVD stores across the country have reportedly been selling an uncut version of the film for weeks.
Hollywood studios are usually willing to comply with China's censorship regulations as they vie for access to the country's rapidly growing film market. In recent months, the infamously cash-strapped MGM Studios digitally altered a remake of the cold war thriller Red Dawn to turn its Chinese villains into North Koreans.
Revenue at China's cinemas has grown tenfold over the past decade, with about 10 screens opening in the country every day.
This article originally appeared on guardian.co.uk
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