Even though he's frequently courted controversy for his depictions of graphic and gratuitous violence, profanity, racial epithets, and revisionist history, Quentin Tarantino has never run so far afoul of the censors that one of his movies has been either banned from cinemas or ordered to be re-edited.
Not in the United States, anyway, but he does have some history with it overseas. The filmmaker has always had a soft spot for the United Kingdom because it was one of the first major markets to embrace his debut, Reservoir Dogs, where it became a word-of-mouth favourite following its 1992 release.
However, even though no cuts were ordered to be made to its theatrical release, Tarantino's first film was briefly banned from being released on home video in Britain over the notorious torture scene, with the BBFC stating that Mr Blonde's perverse combination of song and dance "glamorised the sadism."
From Dusk Till Dawn was banned in Ireland until 2004, with Sheamus Smith of Ireland's Film Censors Office saying that even though "I admire Harvey Keitel and Quentin Tarantino, and I'm not saying everyone in Ireland would be affected by this film, but even if one person were affected, I wouldn't like to have it on my conscience." He wrote the script and played a supporting role, but he didn't direct it, so the point still stands.
Planet Terror, Robert Rodriguez's half of Grindhouse that features Tarantino in a brief cameo, was also outlawed in Germany after being labelled as "media harmful to youth," but it wasn't until Once Upon a Time in Hollywood that one of the auteur's self-directed pictures was slapped with a ban, and it was all because of Bruce Lee.
When she caught wind of how her father was depicted in the semi-fictional story, the martial arts icon's daughter, Shannon, lodged a complaint with China's National Film Administration, insisting that they block the movie's planned release until alterations had been made to the storyline where he unceremoniously gets his ass handed to him by Brad Pitt's Cliff Booth.
The decision was made a week before Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was set to premiere in the country, and as well as being the first Tarantino flick to score a major Chinese release, it was a hammer blow for the Bona Film Group, who'd helped finance the film and awarded them local distribution rights, which weren't worth a penny after it was banned.
Tarantino could have re-edited Lee's scenes to make it past the infamously strict Chinese censorship board if he wanted to, but he didn't. It was either his way or no way at all, and as a result, the much-ballyhooed release of Once Upon a Time to a Chinese audience was mothballed.
Plenty of studios, producers, and filmmakers have bowed to the whims of China's censors before, but he stuck to his guns and refused to water down his penultimate feature, which meant that it never saw the inside of a cinema in the country.