Netflix & Prime Video are changing your favorite movies in one annoying way – but there’s a good reason

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For example, if you watch John Wick on Netflix, its stylized subtitles have been replaced by ordinary captions.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.

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 simple reason why custom subtitles are often stripped away: it makes it easier to deliver the movie in other territories.

The official term is “localization”, but here’s what that really means: to make it easier for movies to be streamed in countries across the world, on-screen text that could clash with normal subtitles is often removed for streaming, with studios providing textless versions of their films.

As another user explained: “Textless versions are required when submitting to streamers to allow them to localize for other regions, but as you point out it’s quite grating when it supersedes the actual original. Also they’re supposed to recreate the effect, not just subtitle it, but they almost never do.”

In other words, it’s more inclusive – but it’s still frustrating when it damages the creative integrity of a film. “People who don’t care about aesthetics and just think about going cheap on localized versioning,” one user complained.

“It’s crazy how the streaming era is discovering new and innovative ways to f**k up movies,” another wrote. “We f**ked up in trusting media to tech. We should have kept DVD/BluRay market going because slowly but surely originals will be lost to time and no one will know what was lost,” a third added.

In the meantime, check out other new movies you can watch this month.