Roman Polanski's film adaptation of Charles Dickens' novel was a European co-production and released in 2005.

As the entry in the BBFC database shows, the film had problems during the rating process for the cinematical run in the UK. One scene was too much for the desired "PG" rating. The distributor chose to censor it.

 Said scene can be found approx. 100 mins into the film. In the UK version, Bill hits five times. We see him taking a swipe three times and while the other two attacks are carried out, we only see the dog sitting next to the action. The runtime of the theatrical version with this censorship notice is completely identical (after conversion) to the runtime of the version that's been put out on DVD.

It has happened numerous times that such mainstream productions have been censored for a younger public in the UK while other European countries or even the rest of the world got the uncensored version (or a differently censored one, just think about the chaos with James Bond 007: Casino Royale).

This was reason enough for us to check several other releases to see what's the situation there. We checked:

- British DVD (PG) by Pathe!

- German DVD (FSK 12) by Tobis/UFA

- American DVD (PG-13) by Sony/TriStar

- French DVD (Tous Publics) by Pathe!

Unfortunately, we could only come to the sobering conclusion that all versions were completely identical, be it in the particular scene as well as in total. Small runtime differences are due to alternative production logos/credits in the beginning.

Even though the checked DVDs do not necessarily represent all worldwide releases, this selection should give an orientation regarding the worldwide status. It can be assumed that the film was released in a censored version internationally.