The scene featured Waltz’s villainous character, Captain Rom, kissing Tarzan while he the man raised by apes was unconscious. However, director David Yates told The Australian, “We pared it back because it was almost too much. It was this really odd, odd moment when Christoph kisses him.”
Yates adds that, “We loved it at the time, but early test audiences were perplexed by it and in the end it just felt too clever and overworked.”
It is an odd one, as it sounds like it was making literal a rather hackneyed stereotype of the bad guy having hidden desires for the hero, which harks back to the days when making villains a bit gay and closeted was used to underline just how evil they were. However, Yates’ comments also hint that the decision to cut the kiss may have been less a genuinely creative decision and more about fears that with hundreds of millions on the line, they were worried about audience reaction to ‘gay stuff’, which is one of the main things currently holding back LGBT inclusion in major movies. Hopefully though it was that they simply realised it was a bad idea and didn’t work.
Darn. And here I thought this was going to be “A Kiss From Alexander.” 🙂