After the colossal success of the Predator Franchise’s latest movie titled ‘Prey’ on the American platform Hulu, the movie is set to entertain Indian audiences from the 7th of October, 2022. While fans are all excited, the announcement’s specifics has also left some fans upset and offended.
‘Prey’ is set to be released on Disney+ Hotstar, which does not come as a big surprise since Hulu usually shows its content in India via the platform. However, what has many offended is how the announcement specified that the hit film will stream on the platform only in Hindi besides its original language English. While fans have expressed their disappointment on social media and have again reignited the Hindi imposition talks on social media, are we jumping the gun too soon?
In this case, yes.
‘Prey’ not being available in the south Indian languages has many hurt and disappointed, especially since the movie is highly anticipated and is called the best film of the franchise in the recent past. But it seems that the upset fans may have reacted too soon unaware of the complete details. Hotstar in its reply to the comments on Twitter has replied with the following explanation:
“Hi! Dubbing of content depends upon the availability of language-specific rights and dubbing rights for the content. However, we’ll share your feedback with our concerned team. Hope this helps.”
It seems the case of ‘Prey’ not being dubbed had nothing to do with Hotstar’s alleged interests but with the technicalities of the movie business. Acquisition of the digital rights of a movie is not a simple process. Negotiations take place regarding many factors, other language rights being one of them.
It is understood from Hotstar’s explanation that ‘Prey’ will be released only in Hindi simply because it doesn’t have the legal rights to dub the film into south Indian languages.
It is to be noted that Disney does dub its content like the Marvel films and Original TV series into south Indian languages so the south audience too can enjoy the content. Its latest release ‘Thor: Love and thunder’ was dubbed into Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam besides English and Hindi.
An issue of the rights of a film has gone on to become a small controversy of sorts on social media because of being unaware of the situation. We do hope we as a community try to look at things objectively before becoming just one with the crowd, quick to point hands without having full details as to the ‘why’ of things.
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