Django Unchained has been pulled from Chinese cinemas on its opening day

Django Unchained has been pulled from Chinese cinemas on its opening day, even after its director oversaw changes to get it past the country's censors, The Daily Mail reports.

Cinemas throughout China today said they were ordered to suspend the Quentin Tarantino film, which has been a blockbuster in the U.S. and the UK.

The sudden decision comes despite weeks of promotion for the violent slave-revenge saga in China, which is now the world's second biggest movie market.

Employees at two Beijing cinemas say an order issued by the importer, China Film Group Corporation, cited an unspecified technical problem with the film.

The employees would not give their full names and calls to China Film Group and the government's film regulatory agency were unanswered, the Associated Press reported.

Some violent scenes had already been cut from Django Unchained to get it passed China's rigorous censorship.
Violence, sex and politically edgy content rarely make it onto Chinese cinema screens.

Tarantino himself was said to be overseeing the process of dulling the colour of blood splatters and lowering their frequency, according to the Guardian.

A spokesman for the Chinese branch of Sony, the film's distributor, told the Southern Metropolis Daily: 'These slight adjustments will not affect the basic quality of the film – such as tuning the blood to a darker colour, or lowering the height of the splatter of blood.

'Quentin knew how to adjust that, and it's necessary that he is the one to do it. You can give him suggestions, but it must be him who does [the tuning].'

With such an exacting system in place the suspension of a film's Chinese première date is unusual.
It's not the first Django Unchained première to be postponed.

The film, which stars Jamie Foxx in the title role, is so violent that the production company behind it decided to cancel its Hollywood premiere in December out of respect to the victims of the Sandy Hook school massacre.