Neon’s body horror film “Together” has been pulled from theaters in China after the indie studio discovered that local distributor Hishow made unauthorized alterations to a key scene involving a videotape of a gay wedding.
The film stars Dave Franco and Alison Brie as a couple who find themselves forced to fuse together into one person after moving to a town with a cult secret. The altered scene is a key one in the film’s plot, as Brie’s character discovers that a person they met in the town has undergone the fusion process with his husband.
But thanks to AI-generated alterations made by Hishow, the version seen in China makes the fused couple a heterosexual one, replacing one of the men in the videotape of the wedding and subsequent fusion with a woman.
Neon bought “Together” at the Sundance Film Festival for $15 million and sold Chinese distribution rights to Hishow as part of the film’s foreign sales process. Hishow pulled the film from theaters at Neon’s request.
“Neon does not approve of Hishow’s unauthorized edit of the film and have demanded they cease distributing this altered version,” Neon said in a statement.
This is not the first time American films have faced LGBTQ+ censorship in China. In the 2022 “Harry Potter” spinoff “Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore,” Warner Bros. removed two lines of dialogue between Jude Law and Mads Mikkelsen that alluded to a past romantic relationship between their characters, Albus Dumbledore and Gellert Grindelwald.
Three minutes of scenes in the 2018 Freddie Mercury biopic “Bohemian Rhapsody” were also cut from the Chinese version to remove any allusions to the Queen vocalist’s coming out as a gay man and his eventual death from AIDS.
