Is censorship in older movies going to get worse?

I cam across this article and video, about how Splash was digitally altered to remove nudity:



The guy in the video says it's just going to get worse, when it comes to Hollywood taking older movies, and digitally altering them, but how worse do you think it will get out of curiosity?

For example in 20 years from now, Is Hollywood going to take a movie like Oldboy, and use CGI to digitally rewrite the entire last half hour of the story, because the climax and ending is just too controversial in their eyes?

That's just an example but do you think it will get that bad, or how bad, do you think it will get?

What they should do is digitally rewrite that corridor fight scene on which I quit watching Oldboy, because it was so ludicrous how one guy walks over 20 henchmen with serious face.

Good or bad - leave it alone!

While it's worth asking the question in general, I don't think Splash is a good example. It's not being censored because butts are bad, but because they're including it on a platform that people are letting children use on their own, is all.

Oh okay, but he said that was just the start and soon every physical media copy of Splash could be altered in the future as a result. I mean the already did it in Star Wars with Han not shooting first. That's not just a TV edit, that's in the physical media now. So is TV only a starting point and it will just get worse?

They showed Han's butt in SW??

Seriously though, movies are always edited for television. I'm not sure I see anything different here than what's existed at least my entire lifetime. Sure, it's fun to speculate and react to the possibility of something happening one day, but I doubt it will get worse than what is necessary for family-viewing convenience. And that's already happening.

I don't think it is a fair comparison linking this to what happened in Star Wars either, really. One is (as I understand it) to be reasonable edits for family viewing. As noted, similar edits already exist whether it's for network scheduling time constraints or language and violence. Par for the course, IMO. The other is creative editing by the property owner. THAT sucks, I admit, but it is not the same. Too, there have been director's cut releases since I can remember, so that's not really anything new either.

I can see, hypothetically, a phase where something like this might become fashionable for some weird political/social movement but I don't see that lasting very long if at all due to the backlash it would likely create. Realistically, I still don't think any of it goes past what it is already.

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Who's "he"? Just some guy in a video? Why would you ask us, essentially random people, to account for the speculation of some other random person?

That's an artistic change (however ill-advised), not an example of censorship. It's the original creator changing his own creation, for one, and for reasons that have nothing to do with the maturity of the content, for another.

Yeah, comparing Han shooting first to nudity in Splash is a false equivalence.

Oh okay, so it's just going to stick to Disney Plus and they are not to release the movie on physical media that way then.

Not necessarily. They might make the change just because of Disney Plus, but then apply it to physical media going forward for consistency.

Oh okay, but that's what I was saying is the problem then. If they change it permanently, isn't that wrong? For example, back in the 90s, on TV, I remember they changed The Big Lebowksi, so that John Goodman says "This is what happens when you find a stranger in the alps", but on physical media, you can still get the original dialogue, unchanged. So if they were to only release the TV edited version of the movie on physical media from now on, wouldn't that be wrong? Isn't that what Disney plus would be doing if they went forward with changing the physical media as well?

Some people think it's wrong, some don't. But that wasn't the question. The question was whether it's "censorship," and I explained why this isn't a good example of that. Unfortunately, as is the case with most of these questions, we've moved from one to the next without any acknowledgement that they're separate.

As I've said before (apparently leading to no change in behavior), you need to ask clearer and more precise questions. If you want to ask if this trend is just bad, then just ask that. If you ask if it's "censorship" (and note that things in titles are going to be treated as a strong summation) you'll get different responses.

As an interesting and related note, the first episode of Season 3 of The Simpsons (the one that stars Michael Jackson) was removed from TV rotation when the documentary about how bad Michael Jackson was towards children was released. I don't know the current status of the episode on Disney Plus (since they own Fox and The Simpsons now), but it was taken off Amazon for a bit but has now been returned. It used to be listed first as Episode 1 (where it should be chronologically), but when it was put back, it was put at the end as Episode 99 (which is weird since there are like 24 episodes in that season).


Pigeonholing episodes of shows like The Simpsons episode mentioned above, editing people out of movies (such as what happened when Kevin Spacey was found to have molested people) or when Bill Cosby was convicted of Rape (he has been removed from The Academy along with Roman Polanski) I think is a much larger issue and very similar issue in this day and age of ghosting people and blacklisting them.

A film being edited for profanity because it's being broadcasted on a cable television network backed by advertisers and subject to stricter FCC regulations, is not the same as a studio retro-actively editing film content it deems too risquι for it's own brand and in-house, subscription based streaming service.

A film's edited-for-TV version becoming the only available option on home media is absolutely improbable outside of the only surviving copy of the film being a TV recording of it. (And it'd have to be a pretty important film or guaranteed profit-making title to be considered as okay for release it in its televised state.)

Even a film having its edited-for-TV version released on home media alongside the original edit is extremely rare, because there's not a big enough profit gain for major studios to do the work in pressing two separate copies of a film to sell when one of those copies consists of something generally ignored outside of the hyper-conscious family and Christian markets. There's literally an a whole aftermarket business built around the niche demographic of people who want to own the TV-edits of movies (of which I'm sure religion plays a majority role) but can't buy them because they're never officially released on home media — e.g., companies like Clear Play, Family Flix, and Clean Films. (The Bush administration actually passed a bill that protected some of these companies from movie studios/rights holders filing lawsuits.)

On the other hand, Disney and their age-old retro-censoring (seriously this is nothing new and they've been doing this for decades) is an entirely different thing. Disney re-edits their media — whether it's their own production or something they've bought the rights for — to maintain their company's reputed public image, which is just corporate slang for "we want to make sure people don't find a reason to stop giving us their money".*

Other Hollywood studios don't have a singular public face that's understood in the minds of consumers. So when Disney edits out nudity in Splash for their streaming service and all future physical releases of that film, there's no reason whatsoever to replace "Disney" with "Hollywood" and start making sweeping predictions like all the industry's studios (especially any of the other majors) will follow suit. And like I said above, Disney has been doing this for many many years, so if other giants in Hollywood were going to emulate it then it would have happened a while ago, and probably be close to normalization at this point.

Oh okay, perhaps I used Hollywood too usely, since Disney is in Hollywood. However, what other movies have Disney done this too besides Splash?

Oh sorry, I meant to infer that I felt it was wrong especially if it's getting worse.

I think that would be on you to cite other movies to support your argument original post, rather than asking others to cite movies that support your post.

• Erasing (some might use the phrase "covering up") their history racist caricatures in various animated films from the mid-late 20th century

• Removed an episode of the Simpsons from Disney Plus last year that had a character who impersonated Michael Jackson

• Editing out 2-3 frames in The Lion King (original) where Simba kicks up some dirt and "SFX" (short for special effects) appeared inside the dust cloud, because an urban legend born in the early days of the Internet said that it actually showed the word "SEX" and that made some parents mad

• Similar to the Lion King urban legend, there was another popular myth on the early internet about an Aladdin character telling kids to remove their close, which was actually not what the line said at all (it was just muddled by other things in the same scene). Again, parents complained and it got removed.

• Going through their library of animated classics and removing anything related to smoking and replacing it to appear like something else

...to name a few

There's also several lists of other Disney Plus edits that a lot of people might not know about, a lot of which are truly ridiculous. To give an example: one of them is a change to a random character's name in a single episode of Hannah Montana from "Isis" to "Ice"...

Oh okay, what are any examples of racist caricatures being covered up?

Oh I was just wondering if because of Splash will it get any worse. I guess I should stick to that question, rather than ask if it's been done to any other movies . Will it get worse then in the future, do you think?