After viral tweet claims 20 minutes cut from ‘Bohemian Rhapsody,’ Malaysian cinema clarifies it’s just three minutes shorter than US version

Still from trailer via YouTube
Still from trailer via YouTube

It was never going to be an easy road for Bohemian Rhapsody in Malaysia: After the country’s film board banned Brokeback Mountain, But I’m a Cheerleader, and Babe: Pig in the City (for LGBTQ+, LGBTQ+, and pig-related themes, respectively), one could only wonder how censors would massacre a film about one of music’s most flamboyant front-men.

This weekend, a tweet addressing just that started picking up viral steam: A social media user claimed that while the US run-time of the film indicated it was 134 minutes long, Malaysian film sites listed it was a 110-minute flick, leading the man to assume that a whopping 24 minutes had been cut.

 

The math certainly seemed to add up, and the story began to spread. Netizens were shocked and appalled, and then the international press set in, with British paper The Independent even running a story on Malaysia’s scissor-happy censors. Considering the live-version Beauty and the Beast barely made it here due to “a gay moment” needing revision and removal, it’s a story that seemed plausible.

Too bad no one actually bothered to check with the studio, the distributor, nor the cinemas — as it turns out, only three minutes were cut from the film. According to both GSC Cinemas, who are screening the flick, and Bohemian Rhapsody’s distributor, 20th Century Fox, (shout-out to hilarious film review site MovieDash.com for that last clarification, please go and read — it’s brilliant), Malaysia’s version of the film has had only three minutes cut.

https://www.facebook.com/GSCinemas/posts/10157119179992275

Also, don’t blame the cinema GSC asks — they’re not the ones who make the call of what gets edited: That’s our country’s film censor board. Chill, GSC — we would never give you that much credit.

While some of you will breathe a sigh of relief that Bohemian Rhapsody has maintained most of its integrity, we managed to catch it last night and the jump cuts were as glaring as a sexless James Bond film.

The bits that were most obvious? Well, Freddie explaining to his fiancee that he was gay without actually ever saying anything of the sort, and managing to convey this with strained looks out of windows; a lot of talk over the music video for I Want to Break Free without ever actually showing it; the muting of the word “AIDS,” but don’t worry — the subtitles managed to catch what Freddie silently “mouthed”; a bit of confusion over how Freddie and his boyfriend Jim Hutton actually met and then formed a deep connection because all we really saw was them saying bye to each other; and every time (we assume) they were showing men kissing.

Disappointing? Yes, of course — like we said earlier, it was never going to be an easy road, considering some of the more ridiculous situations we’ve found ourselves facing when it comes to film censorship. However, we will say that there were a lot of scenes that certainly implied that Freddie was homosexual, including a one-minute long clip of a New York gay bar that we were happy they included.

That Bohemian Rhapsody even made it to the big screen here at all is something that we certainly don’t take for granted (see aforementioned “gay moment” in Beauty and the Beast). It’s an important story to tell, and as long as you have an inkling of who Freddie Mercury was, you’ll be able to connect the dots until we all get the Blu-Ray version that lets us watch it in its glorious entirety.

Until then:






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