The release of Tarantino’s lat­est has been can­celled in China

Quentin Taran­ti­no​‘s no stranger to con­tro­ver­sy, it’s just that for him, the dus­tups usu­al­ly con­cern whether or not he is racist or sex­ist or insuf­fi­cient­ly rev­er­ent of Bruce Lee. Head­lines with the slight fla­vor of ​‘inter­na­tion­al inci­dent,’ how­ev­er — that’s a new one.

The Hol­ly­wood Reporter broke the news ear­ly this morn­ing that China’s Nation­al Film Admin­is­tra­tion has decid­ed to can­cel the release of Tarantino’s new film Once Upon a Time in Hol­ly­wood just one short week pri­or to the sched­uled roll­out. It was to be the first prop­er debut of a Quentin Taran­ti­no pro­duc­tion in the Chi­nese mar­ket, a key piece of the glob­al box-office puz­zle, but sud­den gov­ern­men­tal action has barred the film from theaters.

While it’s stan­dard oper­at­ing pro­ce­dure for China’s gov­ern­ing bod­ies to give no ratio­nale for their deci­sion to black­ball a motion pic­ture, THR’s item cites an unnamed source sug­gest­ing that the much fussed-about Bruce Lee scene — in which the Brad Pitt-played stunt­man Cliff Booth goes mano a mano with the mar­tial arts leg­end — may have been the cause of the sud­den change in plan. Word on the street, as they hear it, is that Lee’s daugh­ter Shan­non brought the com­plaints she’s been air­ing in the US all year to the high­er-ups in China.

It’s a sur­pris­ing move from China’s film board in part because Once Upon a Time in Hol­ly­wood was notably financed in part by the Bona Film Group, a distribution/​production/​financing out­fit based in Chi­na. The THR arti­cle con­firms that the head hon­chos at Bona have begun work­ing ​“fran­ti­cal­ly” with Taran­ti­no to ready an alter­nate cut that will appease the cen­sors in time for the release on 25 October.

This is just the lat­est in a series of eye­brow-rais­ing cen­sor­ship deci­sions com­ing from Chi­na, an increas­ing­ly sig­nif­i­cant force in Hol­ly­wood as well as glob­al film cul­ture. As the NBA and video gam­ing sec­tors in the US con­tin­ue to expe­ri­ence fric­tion with Chi­nese nation­al pol­i­cy, Hol­ly­wood may arrive at the same dif­fi­cult con­ver­sa­tions about the price of acqui­es­cence that has already con­sumed sports, e- and otherwise.