After months of debate, anticipation and heavy marketing, Paul Fieg’s all-female Ghostbusters reboot has finally arrived.
But the world’s most populous nation — and No. 2 film market — won’t be joining the fun anytime soon. The Sony tentpole has been denied a release in China, sources close to the decision-making process in Beijing tell The Hollywood Reporter.
China’s official censorship guidelines technically prohibit movies that “promote cults or superstition” — a holdover from the Communist Party’s secular ideology — and the country’s regulators occasionally have been known to use this obscure provision as rationale for banning films that feature ghosts or supernatural beings in a semi-realistic way (Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest suffered such a fate in 2006, thanks to its depictions of ghouls and cannibalism).
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