Harry Potter Now Playing… on DVD

Yeah, Harry Potter is big here, too. No, I haven’t gone to the theater yet. What’s the point? It’ll be dubbed in Chinese with Chinese subtitles, and several scenes will be missing. Since there is no rating system in China, movies (particularly foreign movies) get “edited” down to suit the general public. This would explain why, when I saw Quantum of Solace and Night at the Museum 2 in the theater, there were so many abrupt transitions and odd cuts. I’m not sure what’s getting cut, though, because the Chinese blockbuster, Red Cliff, still had quite a bit of violence.

To avoid the trouble, you could always go buy the DVD instead. Those bootleggers are pretty good about getting a copy of a new release on store shelves within a few days of a movie’s premier, regardless which country it played in first. It used to be that movies took a while to come to China, but now I’m seeing the bigger names show up nearly the same time as they do in the US. We even got Dragonball: Evolution a few weeks earlier. Sorry, guys, I should have warned you.

I suspect distributors have started taking the Chinese market more seriously, because they realized if they waited too long to bring a movie over, everyone will have already seen it on DVD. Of course, airing a movie in China just makes piracy easier, but when the DVD and the movie experience come out at the same time (and the movie experience is only a few yuan more), some people are bound to choose the latter. Plus, initial DVD prints suck.

29 July 2009 | China | Comments | Home
tags: censorship, movies, piracy

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