Minor But Impactful Changes Made To Movies In Reflection Of Cast & Crew’s Ethics (feel free to add examples!)

Holes: Skinny Stanley 

The Plot: A boy convicted of stealing a famous athlete’s shoes from a charity auction (he’s innocent) is given the choice between a jail or a ‘juvenile detention camp’. He chooses the camp, unaware it’s a forced labour camp where they dig holes to ‘build character’. The protagonist breaks a bad-luck curse on his family by unknowingly befriending the descendant of the woman who cursed his ancestor for breaking a promise, and saving that friend’s life. They dig up a treasure from the time another of his ancestors (the son of the one who got cursed) was robbed by a famous bandit, who targeted rich white men in vengeance after her lover was murdered for kissing a white woman while black. 

The Change: In the original novel by Louis Sacher, the protagonist Stanley Yelnats the Fourth starts the book fat, and becomes thin as a result of forced labour. The director, Andrew Davis, wanted to cast actual teens for the teenage characters and recognized it would be unhealthy to force an adolescent actor to either gain or lose weight (never mind doing both) in the filming schedule’s planned time frame, so Stanley remains a consistent weight for the entire movie. 

Mrs Doubtfire: Staying Divorced 

The Plot: A voice actor recently divorced by his wife passes himself off as an elderly woman to become the children’s nanny and see them more often than his Saturday visitations. (And makes an attempt to ruin his ex-wife’s new relationship.) He is found out, but in a way that ends with him getting his own TV show, and the children’s mother agrees he has proven he can look after their kids responsibly, so the custody arrangement becomes more balanced. 

The Change: The original script called for the divorced couple to reconcile and remarry. Sally Field and Robin Williams, who play the exes, worried this would give false hope to children in the audience whose parents were divorced, and persuaded the director and producer to let their characters stay separated and grow into having an amicable divorce instead. 

Labyrinth: No Smooching 

The Plot: A teenager wishes away the younger sibling she’s babysitting to the realm of the goblins, but is displeased when the King of the Goblins takes her up on the offer. She has to get through a maze to his castle in order to reclaim the child before he turns into a goblin himself. She makes allies with a few citizens of the Goblin Kingdom on her way through, but ultimately confronts and defeats the Goblin King on her own. 

The Change: There is an ongoing romantic subplot between Jareth the Goblin King and Sarah the Labyrinth Adventurer. It was intended for those characters to kiss; which scene is unknown, but it was presumably either during the ballroom illusion or the final confrontation ... or maybe the party scene in the finale. In any case, Jareth’s actor, David Bowie, thought it was inappropriate for a grown adult like him to be locking lips with a young girl, since Sarah’s actor, Jennifer Connelly, was only fourteen or fifteen at the time of filming, so the kiss was edited out of the script.