Famous Film FailsBefore tickets even went on sale, every major motion picture employed dozens of people and cost thousands, if not millions, of dollars. Here is how some of them screwed it all up.
Updated March 21, 2023 11.3K votes 1.2K voters 140.0K views
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Vote for the most ridiculous cases of censorship.
The history of film is littered with movies that were banned for explicit scenes of excessive violence or gratuitous sex. But sometimes films are banned for the most arbitrary of reasons. It can be because of whatever is trending that month, or it can be that the government of certain countries are terrified of time travel. These banned movies were kept from audiences for some seriously ridiculous reason, and most of the time, it was because whoever was in control of the censorship board was just a total square..
Across the globe films from The Interview to The Wild One (starring Marlon Brando), and even ET have been censored for everything from an intent to incite anarchy to the possibility of a film having a negative impact on the film industry of another country. When it comes to movies, the rest of the world does not play around! Check out this list of movies that were banned across the globe and head to the comments section to let us know if there are any internationally banned films that we missed or if you think there's a movie listed here that should definitely be locked away in a vault forever.
Think long and think hard about why The Simpsons Movie was banned in Burma. Was it the cursing? Maybe, but no. Was it Bart's nude scene? You're close. As luck would have it, the colors yellow and red are banned from films in Burma.
Back to the Future is a touch stone of cinema history, but it was too much for the Chinese government. The government deemed that the film was "disrespectful to history" for its use of time travel as a plot device. In 2011, time travel as an artistic theme was outlawed in China, just when it was becoming especially popular in film and television.
The original King Kong film, released in 1933, when people thought that moving pictures were magic and that maybe there was a giant gorilla right there in the theater that was going to eat everyone. Finland banned the movie upon its release because they felt that the effects were too graphic and violent.
The 1994 Steven Spielberg tour de force about Oskar Schindler, the German Nazi party member who risked his life to save 1,200 people, was quite rightly considered a high point in Spielberg's filmmaking career. But it caused an uproar among some Muslim clerics in Indonesia for being "too sympathetic to the Jewish cause." Authorities in the Philippines asked Spielberg to edit the film, but he refused.
The 2D version of James Cameron's film was banned in China after the government worried that the success of the film would affect their own film industry. Censors were also concerned that the film would promote civil unrest. Strangely, the film was allowed to be released in 3D for a limited period of time.
If you were a child of the '80s, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial made huge impact on your life. Whether you were touched by the heartwarming story of a boy and his alien, or you were creeped out by the scary raisin monster, the film still has a special place in your heart. Unless you grew up in Finland, Norway, or Sweden, where children were banned from seeing the movie when it was released because it portrayed adults as enemy figures.
