by Thinus Ferreira
After users of Netflix South Africa noticed a censored version of the Elton John biopic Rocketman that deleted scenes like the kiss between actors Taron Egerton and Richard Madden portraying Elton John and his manager John Reid, Netflix has now replaced the degayed so-called "airline version" with the proper theatrical release in South Africa.
Netflix SA subscribers who watched the 2019 biographical musical film based on the life of the flamboyant British musician Elton John, realised that the film felt oddly different.
They then discovered that the censored film, already carrying a 16+ age restriction on Netflix in South Africa, was scrubbed of several of the overt gay content, although Elton John's sexuality is interwoven in his life story.
A kiss in the closet between Elton John and his former manager is for instance cut from the film version Netflix made available to viewers in South Africa, with Taron Egerton and Richard Madden in Rocketman only seen walking out of a building and never locking lips.
The Netflix SA version, therefore, has a shorter running time that its theatrical release and DVD release and when it was broadcast on M-Net (DStv 101) and on DStv BoxOffice, and also looks and feels different.
After users asked this week about the discrepancy and apparent censorship of the LGBTQI content in the film version for South Africa, TVwithThinus made a media enquiry to Netflix where its licensing division discovered that a different, censored version of Rocketman was accidentally supplied and received from the studio and loaded on Netflix's catalogue.
Netflix SA doesn't have any official comment on the Rocketman mistake but according to insiders the video streaming service is grateful that subscribers spotted the mistake, with Netflix that has corrected and replaced the censored version with the original version of the film.
In 2019 after Rocketman's theatrical release, Shana Krochmal, at the time the digital director of Entertainment Weekly, noted on Twitter how America's Delta airline showed a version of the film that was "stripped of almost every gay reference".
The airline blogger The Points Guy in November 2019 noted how censored airline versions of films often differ from the theatrical release - and not just if its a film containing a scene of a plane crash in it.
According to Jovitah Toh, CEO of Hong Kong's Encore Inflight Limited, quoted in the article "Each airline will provide the distributors with their censorship guidelines and distributors work with them on the edits - for example, nudity, implicit sex scenes, religious representations, plane crashes, competitor airlines' logos, swear words and images or mention of pigs or pork for Muslim carriers are the general items that are edited".
As a distributor, Toh said "We offer the airlines the choice of a theatrical/broadcast version or an in-flight-edited version".
For some reason, such a censored "inflight" version of Rocketman was the version of the film that Netflix got and loaded.
This Netflix mistake is ironic since Elton John, who wrote in The Guardian newspaper in May 2019, noted how he had to fight with the producers to keep some scenes in the film in order to accurately portray his life's story.
"Some studios wanted to tone down the sex and drugs so the film would get a PG-13 rating. But I just haven’t led a PG-13 rated life."
"I didn’t want a film packed with drugs and sex, but equally, everyone knows I had quite a lot of both during the 70s and 80s, so there didn’t seem to be much point in making a movie that implied that after every gig, I’d quietly gone back to my hotel room with only a glass of warm milk and the Gideon’s Bible for company," Elton John wrote.
