Dave Franco and Alison Brie’s horror movie, Together, includes a gay couple — but was reportedly altered during Chinese screenings.
On Wednesday, September 24, Bloomberg reported that a screening of the film in China earlier this month digitally altered a gay couple, replacing the original couple with a straight pair. According to the outlet, one of the male actors featured in the same-sex relationship had their face replaced with a woman’s.
Alleged stills from the original film and the Chinese screenings circulated on social media featuring side-by-side comparisons. One photo included two men standing next to each other at what appeared to be a wedding altar as they held up their hands, which showed rings on their fingers. The second image appeared to be from the same scene, but instead of two men, it was a man and a woman.
“The horror film Together featured a gay couple in a peripheral role (see below) that got magicked into a straight couple in the Chinese edition. No spoilers, but this definitely makes the film make less sense,” one user wrote via X. “One nuance is Chinese movies are not rated for age. Maybe if it were, the same-sex pairing would have survived. But in any case, why not just ban the movie rather than showing it in a compromised state?”
Bloomberg also reported that Together’s Chinese distributor paused its release after receiving backlash. The distributor cited “changes in the film’s distribution plan” as the reason for the pause.
This isn’t the first time a movie has been altered for viewing in the Chinese market. China has a policy where foreign films must be approved by the government before hitting the screen. In some cases, films have provided altered scenes specially for Chinese audiences. The 2012 film, Cloud Atlas, which featured scenes with sexual content that included gay and straight couples, had certain scenes removed. The 2019 Freddie Mercury biopic, Bohemian Rhapsody, was also altered to not include a same-sex kiss and intimate scenes.
Together follows Brie and Franco’s characters, Millie and Tim, a couple in the film as well, as they move to the countryside. While taking a hike near their new abode, the pair falls into an underground cave during a rainstorm and decides to camp for the night. When they wake up in the morning, Millie and Tim find themselves temporarily stuck together. After the night in the cave, the twosome start to feel strange mentally before horrific changes occur with their bodies.
“We play a couple whose reliance on each other leads to some quite horrific outcomes and I’ll admit there are some parallels between what’s on and off screen. Not the horrific outcomes, but we play a couple who have a solid history together,” Brie, 42, said in a joint The Times interview with Franco, whom she’s been married to since 2017. “The film also involves lots of intimate scenes, which was kind of weird. Doing what we had to do in front of a hundred people was a new experience.”
Franco added that with his and Brie’s history they opted not to use an intimacy coordinator.
“We’ve been together almost 15 years; we know what we’re doing and we’re pretty comfortable with it,” he told the outlet.
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