10 movies so controversial that they were pulled from cinemas
The old saying posits that controversy creates cash, but that doesn’t ring entirely true when so many movies have had their earning potential cut off at the knees by either being denied a theatrical release or spending a brief amount of time playing to packed houses before being pulled.
It’s a bizarre phenomenon considering there are so many people, from the filmmakers and studio executives to ratings boards and distributors, who have a say in such matters, only for at least one of the parties to decide later on that they don’t like what they see and order its erasure from the big screen.
The sentiment doesn’t even apply to near-the-knuckle erotic stories or blood-drenched horrors, either. There are some surprising titles that saw their cinema runs cut short for a variety of reasons, and in the odd instance, it turned out to be more of a blessing than a curse.
Nobody wants the infamy of pouring so much time and effort into making a feature only for its lasting legacy to be that of one dragged around the back and put out of its misery ahead of time, but it’s a common trait the following ten titles share, although that’s one of the very few things they have in common.
10 controversial movies pulled from cinemas:
10. United Passions (Frédéric Auburtin, 2015)
United Passions was always going to bomb because it was blatant propaganda largely funded by FIFA to paint itself in a transparently positive light, but the timing of its release was so unfortunate that the film only lasted one week in cinemas.
Weeks before Tim Roth brought Sepp Blatter to life in what was more a fever dream from a sketch show than a serious motion picture, 14 individuals were indicted following an investigation led by the FBI that exposed FIFA as a hotbed of wire fraud, racketeering, money laundering and corruption.
Not a great time for a feature-length hagiography to hit the big screen, then, with United Passions igniting controversy by serving as an expensive vanity project that doubled as damage control. It earned $918 in its opening weekend, and after being pulled by its distributor after a single week, it went down in the history books as the lowest-grossing film to ever be released in the United States.
9. The Hunt (Craig Zobel, 2020)
Craig Zobel’s Blumhouse-backed action thriller that finds an unwitting band of people being hunted for sport by the wealthy did make it to cinemas eventually, but even after all the controversy that followed in its wake, it wasn’t there for long.
Intended for a September 2019 release, two mass shootings saw Universal halt the marketing campaign out of respect, with even more notoriety raised by WWE Hall of Famer and former The Apprentice host Donald Trump claiming it was made specifically to “inflame and cause chaos” among the ticket-buying public.
The Hunt was pulled from the calendar altogether, quietly rolled out in March 2020 in what turned out to be the worst time in recent history to unveil any new movie, regardless of how inflammatory it may or may not be, before it quickly vanished without a trace and was made available for purchase on digital and VOD just 72 hours after its big screen bow.
8. All Quiet on the Western Front (Lewis Milestone, 1930)
The first movie to ever win Academy Awards for ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’ in one fell swoop, All Quiet on the Western Front is a haunting rumination on warfare that endures almost a century later as a stone-cold cinematic classic.
However, due in large part to that message, it didn’t last long in German cinemas. Thanks to a campaign driven by Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, the German authorities pulled All Quiet in the Western Front from local screens in December 1930, and the unedited version of the seminal drama wasn’t shown again to the population until 1952.
Even before they came to power, members of the Nazi party would actively disrupt showings to the point where the film would need to be cut short and the premises evacuated, all because of the organisation’s staunch opposition to its thematic undertones. By placing political pressure on the corridors of power and claiming it could be a contentious, disruptive influence, All Quiet on the Western Front was pulled for what ended up being decades.
7. Silent Night, Deadly Night (Charles E. Sellier Jr., 1984)
These days, alternative Christmas movies that paint the festive season in a decidedly darker light have become commonplace, but there were plenty of people who couldn’t condone a feature focusing on a department store Santa Claus with a thirst for bloody murder.
The entire marketing campaign was built around that very iconography, but a public outcry about such Yuletide staples being used to sell a slasher flick to the masses saw distributor Tri-Star Pictures pull any and all advertisements for Silent Night, Deadly Night less than a week before it was due to premiere.
There were protests and pickets at various screenings, and deciding to cut its losses, the movie ended up lasting just two weeks in cinemas in the United States before being removed from circulation. On the plus side for its financial backers, it did at least manage to recoup its $750,000 budget more than three times over during that time.
6. Mr. Magoo (Stanley Tong, 1997)
A light-hearted, family-friendly comedy adapted from a beloved cartoon that starred Leslie Nielsen in the lead hardly sounds like a magnet for controversy, but Mr. Magoo had been and gone from the multiplex before most people even had a chance to see it for themselves.
The pratfalling slapstick of the title character had been interpreted as mocking people with disabilities, which forced Disney to place a disclaimer before the credits indicating that Mr. Magoo was never intended to be offensive to the near-sighted or blind.
The damage had already been done to its reputation, and while Mr. Magoo came close to recouping its $30 million production budget at the global box office, it only lasted three weeks in Stateside cinemas before the Mouse House decided to cut its losses and pull it completely.
5. Freaks (Tod Browning, 1932)
Although it’s long since been reappraised, Tod Browning’s Freaks proved so controversial at the time of its release that the original version of the movie no longer exists, with the only surviving copies being the ones trimmed down to cause less offence among audiences.
There was precisely one cinema that played Freaks in its intended 90-minute form, leaning into its unique status by billing the engagement as the one and only place where it could be seen as its creator intended. MGM then proceeded to take the scissors out, and two weeks later, Freaks premiered at 64 minutes.
The shortened cut didn’t last too long either and stirred up plenty of ill will along the way, with the studio pulling it from screens and reporting a loss of $164,000 on the production, almost half of the entire budget. History has been a lot kinder to Freaks, but even then, it failed to enjoy any longevity among patrons despite having nearly a third of its footage removed to make it more palatable.
4. The Interview (Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, 2014)
Quite possibly the biggest storm in a teacup modern Hollywood has seen, everyone was ready to blame Seth Rogen for the outbreak of World War III should The Interview defy threats emerging from North Korea and be released in cinemas.
Thrown into a panic, Sony cowed to the demands, claiming the secretive nation would retaliate in kind if the thoroughly uninspiring and one-note comedy followed the path typically set by Rogen’s star vehicles and played on thousands of screens across the United States.
Bowing down, the studio pulled The Interview from a wide release after several prominent chains refused to distribute the film, and it ended up debuting exclusively on digital and VOD with a very limited theatrical engagement to follow 24 hours later. The United Kingdom and Ireland had no such issues, the satirical romp was sent to Netflix a month later, and the looming shadow of the global conflict proved to be for nought.
3. The Outlaw (Howard Hughes, 1943)
Howard Hughes was ahead of the curve on a lot of things, with cinema just one of them after the business mogul decided to manufacture so much controversy for The Outlaw that it ended up being pulled from cinemas and denied release all over the United States.
Sex sells and always has, but Jane Russell’s cleavage proved to be too much for some. Far too much for 20th Century Fox, anyway, who decided not to release it. With the lightbulb going off in his head, Hughes had his team reach out to various societal groups and organisations to tell them just how lewd and lascivious the film was, which ended up giving rise to protests.
The renewed interest eventually secured it a theatrical rollout, but in certain markets, it ended up being pulled after a week due to violations of the Hays Code. It lasted seven weeks in San Francisco, didn’t play at all in Pennsylvania, and finally made its way to a solitary theatre in New York over 18 months after its March 1946 re-release and a whole lot further out from its February 1943 premiere.
2. Scarface (Howard Hawks, 1932)
There’s a lot to be said for a filmmaker willing to stick to their guns and withhold their work from mass consumption if it won’t be shown in its intended form, which ended with Howard Hawks’ Scarface spending decades locked away in the vault.
Thanks to the Hays Code, Hawks was forced to heavily compromise his intentions by watering down the levels of violence displayed on-screen, while multiple states, including New York, Ohio, Virginia, and Kansas, ended up determining that Scarface was far too controversial to be granted a release.
They eventually relented, but only granting the significantly re-altered and edited version the thumbs-up. If Scarface faced so much pressure to find approval after being rejigged in the face of the Hays Code, then it didn’t stand a chance the way the director had imagined it from the start. Thanks to the Al Pacino-fronted remake, though, Hawks’ unfiltered edition eventually saw the light of day and gained new appreciation in the 1980s as a bonus addition to the home video release.
1. A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971)
A unique case, A Clockwork Orange, had already been playing for over a year in the United Kingdom before it was withdrawn from availability, with director Stanley Kubrick as the driving force behind the decision.
Even though the BBFC had passed the literary adaptation for release without demanding any cuts whatsoever, and it hit British cinemas in February 1972, the film being associated with several crimes – including two murders – saw Kubrick decree that enough was enough.
After being urged by the filmmaker to get it out of circulation, Warner Bros. agreed with his call and pulled A Clockwork Orange in 1973, and it wouldn’t be made available in the country either on television or home video until after his death in 1999.
