5 times movies were banned for the silliest reasons
<p>Sometimes films are banned for poor taste, extreme themes, or literal pornographic content. Other times, films are banned for ridiculous reasons. These are their stories.</p>
<p><strong>1. <em>E.T. The Extra-Terrestria</em></strong><em>l</em></p>
<p><a href="http://www.ifc.com/shows/the-spoils-before-dying/blog/2015/06/10-movies-that-were-banned-for-crazy-reasons" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><strong>Apparently</strong></span></a>, the governments of Norway, Finland, and Sweden worried that <em>E.T.</em> film portrays adults in such a bad light that if children were allowed to see it, it would provoke a full-scale revolt. The Swedish Board of Film Censorship banned anyone under the age of 12 from seeing the film in cinemas when it was released.</p>
<p><strong>2. <em>Back to the Future</em></strong></p>
<p>The much loved time travel romp is beloved around the world, not least of all because Michael J Fox is just so damn fun to watch. Unless you’re in China, that is, where any kind of time travel plot is outright banned from the country.</p>
<p><strong>3. <em>The Interview</em></strong></p>
<p>Written by Seth Rogan and Evan Goldberg (the same guys who wrote comedy hits <em>Superbad, This Is the End</em>, and<em> Pineapple Express</em>) <em>The Interview</em> was always going to be edgy and hilarious. Little did anyone realise just how much trouble the film would prove to be as it neared release. The film is about a TV talk show host and his producer who are recruited by the US government to travel to North Korea and assassinate Kim Jong-un. Strangely, the North Korean dictator and his government didn’t see the humour in the film’s plot, and had hackers break into Sony’s computer networks. The regime also threatened violence against any American movie theatre screening the film, which worried most theatre chain enough that the film was shunted sideways into an unglamorous video-on-demand release.</p>
<p><strong>4. <em>Wonder Woman</em></strong></p>
<p>Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman was the superhero 2017 desperately needed, and the worldwide box office and reviews reflected how joyously she was welcomed in just about every corner of the globe. One notable exception to this was Lebanon, where the film was officially banned by the nation’s government. The reason? Because of the war between the two countries, Lebanon bans its residents from having contact with Israel’s people or products. Star Gal Gadot is Israeli, meaning that the film was a no-show.</p>
<p><strong>5. <em>Beauty and the Beast</em> (2017 version)</strong></p>
<p>While there are those of us who could have done without this (perfectly fine) remake, some Disney fans (and professional angry-about-everything-ers) balked when director Bill Condon announced that the film would feature Disney’s first “exclusively gay moment” in a feature film. The news was met with mixed reactions from the LGBTQI community (which we won’t go into here), but with pure venom from some conservatives who believe that this constituted a direct attack on their right to see a young white woman fall in love with a violent beast without being exposed to gayness at the same time. As a result, at least one cinema, in Alabama, refused to screen the film when it was released.</p>
<p><em>Image credit: Getty / Instagram</em></p>
