The movie, which features a very short moment of affection between Michaela Coel’s and Florence Kasumba’s characters, is now unedited in the rest of the Gulf, including Saudi Arabia.
While only a very small number of edits have been made to Marvel’s all-star sequel for it to be released in Kuwait, amounting to just over 1 minute of cuts in total, this has included the 10-second scene in which Aneka kisses Ayo on the forehead. Also removed, at the request of censors, was a scene in which a woman gives birth to a child and the line, “A god to his people.”
Gay Directors, Gay Films? By Emanuel Levy (Columbia University Press, August 2015).
Last year, major titles including Pixar’s Lightyear; Marvel’s Thor: Love and Thunder, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Eternals; and Disney’s West Side Story were all stopped by censors from hitting cinemas over same-gender kisses and gay or transgender characters. None of these films made it to theaters in Saudi Arabia, the region’s biggest market (Kuwait is No. 3, after the U.A.E.).
The decision to remove the scene involving Aneka and Ayo may not come as a surprise to cinemagoers in Kuwait, considered the strictest in the region in terms of censorship and where studios often agree to intimacy edits, even over same-gender relationships. In the first Black Panther, a kiss between T’Challa and Nakia was removed, while a heterosexual kiss was also removed from Encanto.
