Beijing / Los Angeles — A wave of online anger has hit a Chinese distributor after viewers spotted that a same-sex couple in the new body-horror film Together was digitally altered to appear heterosexual for showings in mainland China. Audiences and critics say the change — reportedly made with AI face-replacement tools — erased an important part of the film’s story and crossed a line between censorship and creative tampering.
The film, directed by Michael Shanks and starring Dave Franco and Alison Brie, includes a subplot about a gay male couple. But people who saw early Chinese screenings shared screenshots on social media showing one male character’s face replaced by a woman’s, a swap that turned the on-screen relationship into a heterosexual one. Viewers quickly compared the Chinese prints with versions shown elsewhere and raised the alarm.
Distributor Neon and others in the film’s international team publicly condemned the edit, saying the change distorted the director’s vision and disrespected the film’s themes. After the backlash, the movie’s planned wide release in China was put on hold, and the local distributor said it was revising its release plans.
Critics argue this is not simply pruning for local tastes but a new, troubling use of AI to rewrite films for specific markets. Film scholars and activists say face-swapping or other AI-driven edits can hide censorship in ways that are harder for audiences to detect, and they worry about the precedent it sets for altering stories that centre on marginalized characters.
The incident comes against a wider backdrop of tightened limits on LGBTQ+ content in China, where regulators and platforms have in recent years removed or blocked depictions of queer relationships. Even when homosexuality is not illegal, cultural and political pressures have led distributors to alter or omit LGBTQ+ elements to avoid trouble with censors. Observers say those patterns help explain why a Chinese distributor might opt for an edit rather than show the original.
Filmmakers and free-expression advocates called for transparency: if changes are required for local release, viewers — and the original creators — should be told. Many on social platforms labelled the AI edit “disrespectful” and said it betrayed audience trust, since ticket-buyers in China were not warned they would see a modified version.
Whether the alteration was done under pressure from regulators or as a pre-emptive move by the local distributor remains unclear. But the episode has prompted a larger conversation in the film world about the ethics of using AI to change identity, sexuality or other core character traits — especially without consent from the filmmakers or the people depicted.
As the debate continues, the fate of Together’s China release is uncertain. The controversy has renewed calls for clearer rules on when and how films can be edited for different markets and for industry standards that protect creative integrity — even as new editing technologies make it easier than ever to alter what audiences see.
