These movie scenes had to be altered or even axed completely just to allow their films
to make it by the censors. And while we can’t show you all of these clips, we can certainly
tell you all about them.
2016's Zootopia set a new March record for animated movies when it opened to a $75 million
haul, Walt Disney Animation's biggest opening ever at the time. The film wound up scoring
an incredible 98 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, where critics lauded it for its sumptuous
animation and inclusive message. However, Zootopia's message was delivered in a far
blunter fashion when it was first conceived.
The film we saw in cinemas was a thoughtful commentary on racial profiling, with Zootopia's
minority predator population discriminated against by the fearful prey, despite their
efforts to live harmoniously. The original script, in which cynical fox Nick was the
protagonist, not idealistic bunny cop Judy, contained something called "taming parties"
in which predatory animals were fitted with collars that shocked them whenever they had
a carnivorous thought. Co-director Byron Howard explained during his blu-ray commentary:
"It stuck around a very, very long time because we found it emotionally compelling."
Compelling it may have been, but upon reflection, Disney decided the shock collars struck the
wrong chord.
2016's Deadpool definitively proved once and for all that there's a market for R-rated
superhero films. Described as "gleefully profane" by Rotten Tomatoes, the Ryan Reynolds-led
flick made over $780 million at the worldwide box office, with audiences going nuts for
its no-holds-barred take on the genre. There were some lines that they wouldn't cross,
however, as Tim Miller revealed at an early screening:
"In particular, there was a bar scene that was too vulgar for even the R-rated Deadpool.
T.J. [Miller] and Ryan [Reynolds] got together and wrote a version of the scene that we just
said, 'Oh my God, this is too far.' I mean there were so many people offended...It was
just mean and so I said, 'No. We don't have to do that.'"
T.J. Miller, who plays Deadpool's best friend Weasel, was also present at the event, and
said that the scene, quote, "just got more and more hateful" the longer it went.
Paul Verhoeven made two cuts to his sci-fi classic RoboCop to bring it down to an R.
The offending scenes involved leading man Peter Weller and Kevin Page, who played the
young executive that gets shot to ribbons during a botched demonstration of the ED-209
police robot. Page told The Hollywood Reporter:
"He finally got the R in the last round of submitting to the ratings board by cutting
four seconds: two seconds of me being shot on the table and two seconds of the back of
Peter Weller's head coming off."
Weller, who starred as Alex Murphy, the policeman who becomes Robocop, had the more memorable
of the scenes in question. His hand and arm are blown off by shotgun blasts before he
takes a bullet to the forehead. An elaborate model of Weller was created for the sequence,
which originally showed the exit wound in extreme detail, though this shot lasted less
than a second in the theatrical cut.
Matt Stone and Trey Parker know all about straddling the line between the R and NC-17
ratings: 2004's Team America: World Police had to be re-cut a total of nine times before
the MPAA granted it an R rating. When the duo behind South Park first conceived their
politically-charged, all-puppet satire, the last thing they probably expected to get pulled
up on was the love scene. Parker told the LA Times:
"It's something we all did as kids with Barbie and Ken dolls!"
However, the board didn't see it that way, finding much of the marionette action too
offensive. Producer Scott Rudin said of the prolonged battle to avoid the NC-17 rating:
"There's nothing we're asking for that hasn't appeared in other R-rated movies, and our
characters are made of wood and have no genitalia. If the puppets did to each other what we show
them doing, all they'd get is splinters."
Wes Craven's Scream had to fight with the MPAA to get an R rating. While the director
refused to alter the opening scene in which Drew Barrymore’s Casey is stalked by the
killer, he agreed to remove the shot of her boyfriend's steaming intestines spilling out.
There was one scene toward the end that also had to be tweaked, involving two characters,
Stu and Billy, stabbing each other repeatedly. Craven told Bloody Disgusting:
"Almost the entire third act had to be drastically altered. You know, the whole scene in the
kitchen with the boys stabbing each other to establish the alibi, all of that."
When Craven made Scream 4 in 2011, he was surprised to find the censors in a far more
lenient mood:
"On this film, to my astonishment frankly, there were no cuts demanded. I guess if nothing
else, it's a great example of how as a filmmaker you just have no idea what the MPAA is going
to do."
Deadpool pushed the boundaries of the superhero movie further than they'd ever been pushed
before, and Deadpool 2 upped the ante when it came to gleeful violence, but just like
the first movie, there were some moments that went a little too far and had to be cut. Speaking
to CBR, screenwriter Rhett Reese revealed that one of the film's post-credit scenes
was originally going to involve Deadpool traveling back in time and fulfilling a long-held fantasy
that countless people have had over the years
"Originally it ended with Deadpool killing baby Hitler. At the very, very end of the
credits, we had him going and killing an infant version of Hitler. [We] decided that was a
little too harsh, not killing Hitler, but killing a baby."
The scene was shot and included in a test cut, but audiences didn't react as favorably
as the filmmakers originally envisioned. Reese recounted to Uproxx:
"He's got the crib and he's standing in the German nursery and he's leaning over the crib
to do it and there was kind of this, 'ohhhhh.' And we thought we don't want to leave the
crowd on an 'ohhhhh.' So it ended up coming out."
"I think we both know I don't have what it takes to do this."
There are numerous examples of politically incorrect moments in classic Hollywood movies
that most certainly wouldn't make it past censors today, like Mickey Rooney's portrayal
of a Japanese man in Breakfast at Tiffany's or Disney's now-infamous reconstruction era
movie Song of the South. Not many of them are as recent as 1985's Back to the Future,
but at least director Robert Zemeckis had the good sense to cut a blatantly homophobic
scene before the movie hit theaters.
The film's plot revolves around teenager Marty McFly traveling back in time and inadvertently
becoming his own mother's love interest, so it was always going to be a tightrope walk
for Zemeckis. In the end he got the balance right,
"I don't...I don’t know what it is, but when I kiss you it’s like I’m kissing
my brother."
But the deleted scene would have been a huge problem had it remained.
In the deleted scene, Marty tells Emmett "Doc" Brown that he's feeling a little weird about
the situation he's found himself in. The Doc responds by telling him to, quote, "take a
few liberties with her", which is creepy enough as is. But it's Marty's reply that really
shocks as he asks Doc,
"What if I go back to the future and I end up being...gay?"
1985's The Black Cauldron almost sank Disney completely. With a production budget of $25
million, which had reportedly ballooned to $40 million by the time it was finished, this
loose adaptation of Lloyd Alexander's award winning fantasy series The Chronicles of Prydain
was the most expensive animation ever made at the time. With Walt himself no longer around,
new CEO Michael Eisner was eager to take the company in a new direction and tap into the
Dungeons and Dragons-loving teen market, though he came to regret his decision.
When his new team of young animators brought the finished product to Roy Disney, Walt's
nephew apparently experienced a, quote, "'Oh no' feeling." Directors Ted Berman and Richard
Rich had gone way too dark for Disney sensibilities. New head of animation Jeffrey Katzenberg cut
a whopping 12 minutes from the movie, including a now notorious scene in which the Horned
King's undead army kills two henchmen in gruesome fashion, their skin is melted away, leaving
only their skeletons behind.
A former bad boy of British cinema, late director Ken Russell pushed his luck with film censors
throughout his often controversial career. The English director received an Oscar nomination
for his 1969 film Women in Love, but recognition from the Academy didn't make him want to tone
his style down. Quite the opposite, in fact, the ending Russell originally had planned
for 1971's The Devils became the thing of legend.
One scene, the name of which is so controversial we can’t even say it on YouTube, wasn’t
thought to actually exist, until a film critic found it gathering dust in a Warner Brothers
vault.
UK's Channel 4 ended up showing the infamous scene, in which a group of crazed nuns get
intimately familiar with a statue of their Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, directly after
the Russell documentary, Hell on Earth: The Desecration and Resurrection of The Devils.
Unsurprisingly, the climactic scene had to be cut from The Devils before censors would
approve the film for release, as did a number of other offensive moments. There was originally
a scene in which Vanessa Redgrave's Sister Jeanne puts a charred human bone somewhere
that she really shouldn't, and, according to The Guardian, Russell was forced to edit
out several other shots to appease U.S. censors.
Todd Phillips' Joker has no shortage of extreme and arguably offensive moments, but there
was at least one finished scene that was too much for the theatrical cut. Speaking at the
Santa Barbara International Film Festival, director Todd Phillips revealed that he would
often allow leading man Joaquin Phoenix plenty of room to improvise, which led to some pretty
crazy moments. Phillips told Esquire:
"There were two or three [impromptu scenes] we shot, one that is amazing in a bathtub,
but I don't think we can actually include it in an R-rated movie and it's not because
it was pornographic, it was just insane."
Phillips didn't explain why the axed bathroom scene would have rubbed censors the wrong
way, leaving fans to guess just what he filmed that day. One scene that did make the final
cut saw Arthur Fleck giving his frail mother a bath. Could this scene have originally been
longer? Or was Phillips talking about a different bathtub scene altogether? Sadly, we'll probably
never find out, as Phillips told Collider:
"I hate deleted scenes. They're deleted for a reason. The movie that exists is exactly
the movie I want it to be and I will never show a deleted scene."
Disney+ users are met with a warning about, quote, "outdated cultural depictions" when
they select some of the studio's older animated offerings, Fantasia included. Released in
1940, Disney's third feature film consists of eight individual segments, one of which
was considered controversial from the beginning.
The female centaurs in the fifth segment, The Pastoral Symphony, were originally drawn
bare-breasted, but the nudity ultimately fell outside of Motion Picture Production Code
guidelines, meaning they had to be redrawn. The centaurs' breasts were covered up, but,
remarkably, nobody saw a problem with the racially insensitive depictions of black centaurs
in the Greek mythology-inspired segment.
In the original version, The Pastoral Symphony features two dark-skinned female centaurs
named Otika and Sunflower, both of whom serve light-skinned characters. Otika rolls the
red carpet out for Bacchus, the God of Wine, while Sunflower is shown polishing the hooves
of a white female centaur.
The studio started editing the characters out of the film in 1969. Disney editor John
Carnochan, who removed many of these shots for the 1991 VHS release, told Entertainment
Weekly:
"It's sort of appalling to me that these stereotypes were ever put in."
In the year 2000, Disney released a so-called uncut version of Fantasia to mark the film's
60th anniversary, keeping Otika and Sunflower out of sight with subtle pans and zooms.
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