Stephen King's It passed by CBFC with no cuts; Warner Bros-India thank Prasoon Joshi

Ever since the sanskaari Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) chief Pahlaj Nihalani was sacked, every eye is watching the moves of his successor, ad-man and lyricist Prasoon Joshi.

Recently, ahead of the release of Andres Muschietti’s film adaptation of Stephen King’s spine-chilling novel  It , Joshi was put under a lot of scrutiny. There were reports that the CBFC’s examining committee had ordered 12 cuts in the film under Joshi’s leadership, and this raised questions about his “liberal and progressive” outlook.

It was reported that three words — ‘p***y’, ‘motherf****r’ and ‘c**t’ — were ordered to be muted in the film, in addition to the supposed 12 cuts. Now, it is being reported that Joshi restored all the cuts and passed the film with an ‘A’ certificate, DNA reports.

Denzil Dias, Vice President and Managing Director, Warner Bros Pictures-India, told DN__A, “The CBFC Chairperson never reimposed the cuts. If some of those cuts were reimposed, we would not have released the film. The whole issue was misinterpreted. On the contrary, he waived off all the cuts with the exception of a minor audio mute, which was acceptable to us. We are thankful to the Chairman and the CEO for their very progressive thoughts.”

He further said, “The initial 12 cuts were very regressive and disappointing, but we then approached the Revising Committee. Yes the CBFC chief did preside over and the way he interpreted the film made a lot of sense. He is certainly progressive and liberal, which reflected in his perception towards the context of filmmaking.”

According to a report by The Quint , the present rule in CBFC states that if a film has been given ‘A’ certificate, then there will be no verbal and visual cuts.

It stars Finn Wolfhard, Jeremy Ray Taylor, Wyatt Oleff, Jaeden Lieberher and Bill Skarsgård, who takes on the titular role of the malevolent clown. The film’s screenplay adaptation is by Chase Palmer and Cary Fukunaga and Gary Dauberman.