New Superman movie is forced to CUT two scenes after they were deemed 'overly sensual' for Indian audiences
While cinemagoers in the rest of the world saw the blockbuster in its entirety, Indian fans noticed a jarring skip.
On two occasions, as the superhero leaned in for a kiss, the film suddenly lurched forward, cutting to the aftermath of an embrace.
The film, directed by James Gunn, originally featured a 33-second scene between Superman and Lois Lane in which they are seen passionately smooching.
However, India's notoriously prudish film board, the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC), deemed this inappropriate for Indian audiences and subsequently cut it from the movie.
The organisation said the moment was 'too sensual' to be branded with the U/A film certification, which roughly translates to a 12A or Parental Guidance in other countries around the world.
The cuts have sparked furore from some viewers, who have accused CBFC of regressive and hypocritical censorship.
Many highlighted that the same board which removed a consensual kiss regularly permitted films that glorified violence, promoted regressive gender roles, or peddled misinformation about minority religious communities.
Fans have taken to social media to express their frustration over the cuts.
One viewer said: 'CBFC would allow horrific scenes of violence and sexual assault in a U-certified film that kids are freely allowed to watch, but won't allow consensual kissing in a U/A comic book movie that kids should watch under adult supervision.'
Another added: 'Dear Board Members of CBFC, you are a disgrace to the film industry.
'Emoji censoring was your lowest point, & today, it was kissing (not making out, just passionate/sensual kissing) in Superman that was cut.
'If movies are already made to be in ICU, you are the kill switch.'
A third wrote: 'Now watching and boy howdy the Indian censor board has embarrassed itself with the abrupt cuts they've made to the film.
Fans have taken to social media to express their frustration over the cuts
The organisation said the moment was 'too sensual' to be branded with the U/A film certification, which roughly translates to a 12A or Parental Guidance in other countries around the world
'The 'morality' of aside, the way they've managed to mangle the flow is atrocious. Awful editing job all around by the CBFC.'
It comes after Superman had a super opening weekend as the new action adventure soared to the top of the box office.
Fans of the superhero turned over some $122 million to see the new action adventure during its debut, according to The Numbers.
The action adventure starring David Corenswet at the Man of Steel earned an 82-percent critics rating and an even more enthusiastic score of 93-percent from audiences on Rotten Tomatoes.
The film earned another $95 million internationally, but did not do as well overseas, perhaps due to the current political climate between the United States and the rest of the world.
'Superman has always been identified as an American character, and in some parts of the world, America is currently not enjoying its greatest popularity,' David A. Gross, of the movie consulting firm FranchiseRe told Variety.
Gross praised director James Gunn for focusing on the story rather than relying on big stars to attract the audience.
'This is the original, comic book hero story about a flawed and reluctant every-man who uses his special powers to fight evil. That arc is reliable and relatable,' he said.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Guardian
34 minutes ago
- The Guardian
‘They're rowdy. They're vibing. I rip my shirt off': the exploding career of Hanumankind, India's hottest rapper
Two weeks ago, halfway through his first ever UK show, Hanumankind instructed the crowd to mimic him by hopping to the right then to the left, back and forth, in unison. But the rapper from India slipped and fell, limping to the end of the gig in evident pain, kept upright by his DJ and inspired by the audience's singalong familiarity with his catalogue. 'We were ready to have a good time,' he sheepishly grins from an armchair at his record label's offices three days later. It turns out he has torn a ligament. 'It was a battle of internal turmoil. The show was like a fifth of what it was meant to be, but I gave it my all. London has a beautiful energy which gave me strength.' Even without the leg injury, the 32-year-old star, who was born Sooraj Cherukat, has reached a testing threshold in his short, explosive career. His tracks Big Dawgs and Run It Up, helped by action-movie music videos, have made him one of the most talked-about MCs in the world. A$AP Rocky and Fred Again are among his recent collaborators. Indian prime minister Narendra Modi even invited Cherukat to perform at an event in New York last September. But as a rare south Asian face in globally popular rap, he feels a certain responsibility. 'The past year has been hard,' he says. 'I'm trying to navigate through it.' What's more, although he expresses a deep pride about life in India, 'a lot of things are off. There is a mob mentality. There's a lot of divisiveness because of religion, background, caste. It doesn't sit well with me. I'm in a unique space to change the way people can think within my country.' Born in Malappuram, Kerala, which he remembers as a 'green, beautiful environment', Cherukat spent his childhood following his father's work abroad, from Nigeria to Saudi Arabia to Britain. 'We'd traverse different countries and I'd sing songs in whatever language I was picking up,' he says. 'Wherever I went, I had to get involved and be ready to leave. I learned to connect with people. That's why the power of the word is so important to me.' At the age of 10, he landed in Houston, Texas, and found a rare stability. It was the early 2000s and the city was an engine room for rap innovation. Cherukat's set his accent to a southern drawl. Already a fan of heavy metal – which makes sense given his grungy, rockstar leanings today – he became hooked on the local chopped-and-screwed subgenre pioneered by DJ Screw, Three 6 Mafia and Project Pat. In his teens he was 'burning CDs full of beats, riding around smoking blunts and hitting hard freestyles'. He returned to south India just before hitting 20. 'The only place I had roots,' he says. He completed a university degree in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, before working a corporate job in the tech hub of Bengaluru. Seeing rap as 'a party thing, a way to de-stress and stay connected to the art form', he performed at open-mic nights, softening his US accent and perfecting his stage show for an Indian audience. 'Friends would come to watch and be like, 'Dude, you're not bad. You should lock in.'' So he did. At the end of 2019, Cherukat played his first festival: NH7 Weekender in Pune, Maharashtra. The crowd went wild, quickly morphing from a small handful into a packed moshpit. 'They're rowdy and they're fucking vibing,' he says. 'I rip my shirt off. I'm like, 'OK, I can do this!'' He quit his job and began plotting his next move, filling notebooks with lyrics throughout the pandemic. These are a blend of cheek and grit delivered with a flow that keeps respawning at different speeds and scales. Soon, Cherukat was signed by Def Jam India. Part of a movement to reject the remnants of British colonialism in favour of local expression, the proud, rebellious patchwork of Indian hip-hop encompasses the vast country's 'hundreds of languages, each as deeply rooted as the next', Cherukat explains. 'Someone who speaks Hindi or another regional language will give you a vast amount of depth and detail in what they're doing.' His decision to rap mostly in English therefore came with risks of being perceived as inauthentic at home, but it has certainly helped his global crossover. Besides, he has found other ways to communicate a homegrown aesthetic. Run It Up marches to the beat of Keralan chenda drums, while its video features martial artists from disparate corners of India. Cherukat performed it with a band of drummers at Coachella festival, his debut US gig. 'Most people don't know what is going on in my country,' he says. 'Maybe I can open up some doors, open up some eyes, break out of these bubbles and stereotypes.' Although not religious, Cherukat has a divine figure woven into his performing name. Over recent years, Hanuman, the simian-headed Hindu god of strength and devotion, has been employed everywhere from the car stickers of hypermasculine Indian nationalism to the bloody, satirical critique of Dev Patel's 2024 thriller, Monkey Man. Where does Hanumankind fit into this: traditionalist or progressive? 'I need to make music for myself first,' he says simply. 'But when you have a platform, you can bring about change through your words and actions.' Some fans were disappointed that he accepted the New York invitation from Modi – whose Hindu nationalist government has been accused of democratic backsliding and Islamophobia. Cherukat has defended his appearance, describing it as 'nothing political … We were called to represent the nation and we did that.' But today he claims his 'political ideology is pretty clear' to anyone who has been following his career. In one of his earliest singles, 2020's Catharsis, he rails against systemic corruption, police brutality and armed suppression of protest. 'I'm not just trying to speak to people who already agree with me,' he says. 'I'm trying to give people who are otherwise not going to be listening a chance to be like, 'OK, there is some logic to what he's saying.'' Monsoon Season, his new mixtape, is just out. It features the mellow likes of Holiday – performed on the massively popular YouTube series Colors – as well as raucous collaborations with US rap luminaries Denzel Curry and Maxo Kream. It is less a narrative album, more a compilation, with songs gathered over the years before the spotlight shone on him. 'I have a lot of memories of coming into Kerala during the monsoon,' says Cherukat of the project's name. 'You can have days where things are absolutely reckless, flooded, out of control. There can be days where you get introspective and think about life. There are days where you love the rain: it feels good, there's that smell in the air when it hits the mud, the soil, the flowers. Your senses are heightened. You can fall in love with that. Or it can ruin all your plans and you hate it.' Cherukat's knee will take some time to recover before he embarks on a North American tour later this year. It's clear he needs a break: not just to heal, but to continue processing fame, adapt to its changes and return to the studio. 'I'm still adjusting,' he says. 'The attention, the conversation, the responsibility, the lifestyle, all this shit. Things have been a little haywire. So I just want to go back to the source – and make music.' Monsoon Season is out now on Capitol Records/Def Jam India
The Guardian
14 hours ago
- The Guardian
Indian film company to rerelease romantic drama with AI ‘happy ending'
An Indian film company is rereleasing a 2013 romantic drama with an alternate artificial intelligence ending without the involvement of its director, in what could be the first instance of its kind in global cinema. Raanjhanaa, a Hindi-language film about the doomed romance between a Hindu man and a Muslim woman, will return to cinemas on 1 August under its Tamil-language title Ambikapathy. The film's original tragic ending will be replaced by a 'happy' one. Pradeep Dwivedi, the chief executive of Eros Media Group, defended its decision, saying technological innovation was part of the company's long-term creative and commercial vision. He said the alteration was an 'exploratory baby step' and confirmed that Eros was 'significantly evaluating' its library of more than 3,000 releases for similar AI treatments. 'If the technology allows us to do something and we can do something good with it, why not?' he said. 'There has to be a symbiotic understanding of what the technology allows, what the creative process can foster, and what the audience accepts.' The rerelease has drawn strong criticism from the film's director, Aanand L Rai, who said he learned of the move through media reports. 'I'm heartbroken that this is the future we're heading toward, where intent and authorship are disposable,' Rai told the Press Trust of India. 'All I can do is dissociate myself from such a reckless and dystopian experiment.' He said his team had contacted the Indian Film and Television Directors' Association and was exploring legal options. Neither he nor the guild responded to the Guardian's request for comment at the time of publication. The film starred the Tamil actor Dhanush and the Bollywood actor Sonam Kapoor as the star-crossed interfaith couple, one of whom dies in the original ending. Eros's catalogue includes Indian classics such as Sholay, Mother India, Om Shanti Om, and Bajirao Mastani. Its streaming service, Eros Now, hosts more than 11,000 digital titles. Dwivedi said Ambikapathy was produced entirely in-house with human supervision, and was being presented as an optional alternative rather than a replacement of the original film. Posters for the rerelease describe the ending as AI-powered, although Eros declined to confirm whether similar disclaimers will appear within the film itself. Dwivedi said the director's criticisms were 'emotional' and omitted relevant legal context. He pointed to an ongoing corporate dispute between Eros and Colour Yellow Productions, the studio co-founded by Rai. In an email to the Guardian, Colour Yellow's chief operating officer, Harini Lakshminarayan, said the company's partnership with Eros ended 'some time ago' due to operational challenges. 'To call this a 'respectful creative reinterpretation' while excluding the very people who made the film over a decade ago is deeply contradictory,' she wrote. She said the incident underscored 'the urgent need for fair, transparent protocols' on the use of AI, especially with archival material. 'If a finished film can be altered and rereleased without the director's knowledge, it sends out a clear and very troubling message – that the film-maker's voice is dispensable.' The film critic Sucharita Tyagi said: 'Most directors in India don't even own the rights to their films,' referencing examples such as Vasan Bala's Peddlers, which Eros International has still not released to the public after acquiring Indian distribution rights in 2012. 'If they decide to AI alter Peddlers and then release it, then it's a different film altogether.' The release has also raised questions about how the film's new 'happy ending' may reinterpret its interfaith storyline, a sensitive topic in India's political and cultural landscape. 'The film works because these are people trying to defy social norms,' said Tyagi. 'To now decide what a 'happy ending' looks like, 13 years later, is scary.' Ambikapathy is scheduled to open before Rai's latest feature, Tere Ishk Mein, also starring Dhanush and due for release in November. Rai has described the new film previously as being 'from the world of Raanjhanaa' but not a sequel. Eros, which holds the rights to Raanjhanaa, has denied any connection between the two projects. The rerelease comes amid growing experimentation with AI across the global film industry. In Hollywood, AI has been used for voice cloning, dubbing and visual effects, including accent enhancement in The Brutalist and simulating the voice of Anthony Bourdain in the 2021 documentary Roadrunner. Concerns about AI-generated scripts and the use of actors' likenesses were key issues in the 2023 writers' and actors' strikes.
The Guardian
18 hours ago
- The Guardian
Russia has also declared war on literature. Look at what's happening and be warned
'Manuscripts don't burn,' the protagonist of Mikhail Bulgakov's novel The Master and Margarita is told. This maxim is voiced by Satan, in reference to the Master's destroyed opus. Having restored it, the devil punishes the man who tipped off the police about 'illegal literature' kept in the Master's flat, so as to move there himself. Bulgakov didn't have to make this up. Surrounded by snitches, he managed to survive the Great Terror of the 1930s, as did his books. The Master and Margarita, on which he worked until his death in 1940, was first published uncensored in the USSR in 1973. In the early 1990s, censorship was officially lifted in Russia. For a while, one could publish almost anything, but now literature has again become a target of oppression. Things have become particularly dire since 2022, the year Russia invaded Ukraine and criminalised 'LGBT propaganda' among adults. In 2023 another bill was passed, outlawing the 'international LGBT public movement' as extremist. These laws are now being deployed in Russia's war on its book industry. Earlier this year, Russian police, armed with a list containing 48 titles, raided several bookshops, ordering the staff to remove copies of the books on the list. Administrative proceedings were launched and fines issued. In May, 10 people affiliated with Eksmo, the country's largest publishing corporation, were detained in Moscow. Three of them – Pavel Ivanov, Dmitry Protopopov and Artyom Vakhlyaev – were charged with 'organising activities of an extremist organisation', that is, distributing LGBTQ+-themed books. They remain under house arrest and face up to 12 years in prison. One of the books used as evidence in the case is Pioneer Summer, a bestselling novel by Elena Malisova and Katerina Sylvanova that was published in 2021 by Popcorn Books (a Moscow-based imprint now part-owned by Eksmo). Over the past three years, it has provoked outrage, particularly among Russian politicians, despite being anything but steamy: the teenage protagonists of this gay love story never go beyond kissing. At any rate, its runaway success was part of the driver for the Kremlin's crackdown. Other titles that had to be withdrawn from sale include Russian editions of Susan Sontag's Against Interpretation and Olivia Laing's Everybody, books that discuss homosexuality, though hardly in an extremist way. It's not just LGBTQ+-related topics, however loosely defined, that are deemed incendiary. Felix Sandalov, the director of StraightForward – an international project he cofounded to promote uncensored literature about Russia – told me about other taboos. They include comparisons between Stalinism and Nazism, unfavourable mentions of the Russian Orthodox church and, of course, any insufficiently patriotic takes on the current war in Ukraine. Prohibitions keep multiplying. One piece of legislation will criminalise 'propaganda' promoting childfree lifestyles. There are also plans to crack down on what Russian legislators call an 'international Satanism movement'. If that happens, Bulgakov's novel might disappear from the shelves again. The result of Russia's latest assault on free speech is a book industry in turmoil. Everyone is scared, several insiders told me, asking not to be named. The approach taken by the authorities – to keep people guessing what's allowed and what's not – appears to be an efficient intimidation strategy. Nevertheless, working under growing scrutiny, publishers have been devising countermeasures. Sandalov, formerly the editorial director of Individuum (another Moscow-based imprint in which Eksmo recently bought a 51% stake), recalls how some of its authors were registered as 'foreign agents' following the extension, in 2021, of another repressive law. 'Initially we could still publish [these authors] provided we observed the labelling rules,' he says. While doing so, they found a witty way to partially circumvent the obligatory 'produced by a foreign agent' warning by blurring it. Another clever move was their cover of Martha Gellhorn's The Face of War, with its visual evocation of the letter Z, the symbol of Russia's military aggression. The anti-war graffiti it inspired can be found in many cities. With the prospect of criminal persecution looming large, however, fighting the censors is becoming too dangerous. Victoria, a publishing professional with links to the Russian book market, told me independent publishers are dropping any problematic subjects and instead branching out into new areas, such as Asian cultures and art history. She sees this as 'a form of ideological opposition and survival in this totalitarian nightmare'. Expecting the screws to be tightened further, some publishers compile their own lists of titles to be removed from shops. Such self-censorship is no doubt convenient to busy law enforcers. 'In the 2010s,' Victoria says, 'it was widely believed that … the authorities in this country don't read books.' Whether they've since become avid and attentive readers is unclear. Their decision to ban Leslie Kern's Feminist City – a study of urbanism – might be explained by their kneejerk tendency to ascribe LGBTQ+ connotations to the word 'feminism'. As for Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet and Walter Benjamin's One-Way Street, these works could only be blacklisted by someone who didn't understand them at all. But it's not just the state wielding its own apparatus to further restrict freedom of expression. Ordinary readers also do their bit for law and order. Police are sometimes alerted to suspicious books by vigilantes who post offending passages on social media. The existence of informants is not surprising. I dislike a book, I complain about it, it gets banned; thus, my voice has been heard. In a country with no democratic mechanisms left, reporting something objectionable is the only way for an individual to participate in public life. Any community where people feel politically disengaged – as they increasingly do in the UK and across the world – risks descending into the same madness. Censorship always relies on self-censorship, be it in Russia or in the west, where (to give but one example) venues cancel shows by artists protesting Israel's genocide in Gaza. Speaking your mind is, naturally, fraught with more serious consequences in totalitarian states than in those where censorship is mostly limited to economic measures, but the gap is closing. Whatever your government's human rights record, freedom of expression should never be taken for granted. Unlike the fireproof manuscripts in Bulgakov's fiction, real-life books, once banned, can be destroyed for ever. As the repressive campaign continues, pre-emptive self-censorship in Russia is gaining momentum. Last month Eksmo opened an exhibition at the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation – the federal agency that brought the case against the corporation's employees – to celebrate 'heroes past and present', from Soviet secret policemen to those involved in the making of 'the great legend', as one of the books on display refers to the Ukraine war. Published with the support of the ministry of defence, it features Stalin's name on page one. On page seven there is an error: the author got the month of Russia's 2022 invasion wrong. The hagiographers of this war are as inept as those who wage it. Anna Aslanyan is a journalist and translator, and the author of Dancing on Ropes: Translators and the Balance of History Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
