Netflix and Prime Video subscribers have noticed a bizarre change to some of their favorite movies, but as frustrating as it is, there’s a good reason behind it. Last week, the “original” version of Lilo and Stitch went viral when an X/Twitter post compared two clips side by side: one showed Lilo climbing out of a tumble dryer, and the edited version had her crawling out of a cabinet. While there’s a bit more to it, there’s a salient point: streaming services can alter and censor movies however they see fit.
Sometimes there’s a wider cultural reason (like Michael Jackson’s The Simpsons episode being removed from Disney Plus), but it may also be tied to something technical. For example, if you watch John Wick on Netflix, its stylized subtitles have been replaced by ordinary captions. If you stream The Royal Tenenbaums via Prime Video, its on-screen text has been “removed and replaced with sh*tty closed captioning,” as one user pointed out .
I rented The Royal Tenenbaums on @PrimeVideo last night, and inexplicably, a large amount of the iconic on-screen text has been removed and replaced with shitty closed captioning. This has got to be some kind of violation of an editing contract, right? Why even do this? pic.twitter.
com/8EpvBKW1Dx Kill Bill has a similar issue, with Netflix seemingly forcing you to turn on subtitles to hear Hattori Hanzo’s dialogue, rather than automatically providing them. It’s left subscribers incredibly frustrated, but there’s a si.