Update (6 December 2020):

Just one day after it premiered in China to extreme backlash due to one racist joke, the Monster Hunter movie has already been pulled from cinemas in the country.

At the time of writing, it is unclear if the movie will ever return to showing in cinemas in China, or if it will remain banned in the future. According to video games analyst Daniel Ahmad, Capcom themselves are currently investigating the production company and the issue at hand.

You can check out the original story below:

The Monster Hunter movie by Paul W.S. Anderson only just premiered in China today on 4 December 2020, but it’s already going viral for the wrong reasons.

As shared by video games industry analyst Daniel Ahmad on Twitter, a brief 10-second clip from the movie features an interaction between two soldier characters in a military vehicle.

One of the characters makes an offensive joke that pokes fun at the Chinese, using “Chinese” as a racist slur for the punchline to his joke. The dialogue is as follows:

“Look at my knees.

What kind of knees are these?

Chinese.”

It turns out that this joke is considered especially offensive in China and even Japan (if you replace Chinese with Japanese).

For a movie that’s already being ridiculed for not being accurate to the games that it’s adapted from, featuring offensive jokes like this one just hurts the movie even more.

How did this even get past the director and editors in the first place? It’s even more mind-boggling seeing as the movie’s very first market is in China of all places.

This doesn’t bode well for the movie in other markets, as many Twitter users are already showing off their dismay at the racist joke.

Update: This revelation also affected the Steam community page of Monster Hunter World. The game received a huge number of negative reviews as of this time of writing, with most of them in Chinese & criticizing the joke made.

Monster Hunter is slated to premiere in Malaysian cinemas on 28 January 2020. In the meantime, check out the trailer below: