In case you guys didn’t know yet, ZEE5 has managed to acquire the streaming rights for the Manju Warrier Malayalam techno-thriller, ‘Chathur Mukham‘ and the film has been available for viewing on the OTT platform for almost a day now. The movie continues to gain traction even on the OTT platform, getting as much attention (and possibly even more) than when the movie released in theatres months ago. However, ZEE5 has managed to repeat an issue (allegedly) in this movie here, similar to its 2021 release of another Malayalam film, ‘Java’ and Netflix’s ‘Nayattu’. This is the same issue that has been repeating recently on multiple OTT platforms – the revision of subtitles.
Vivek Ranjit, a subtitler for many major Malayalam films in his career (‘Drishyam 2’, ‘Lucifer’, ‘Ayyappanum Koshiyum’, to name a few) has made his displeasure against ZEE5 known again – particularly at their Quality Control (QC) team for what they did to his subtitles for the aforementioned mentioned ‘Chathur Mukham’, on Twitter. According to him, ZEE5 changed the entire set of subtitles he had provided for the movie and the QC team created a new version from scratch, which they then uploaded for the film. Disregarding the hard work done by this renowned subtitler (which we cannot do so easily), that much amount of changes done to the film’s subtitles requires a lot of time and money.
Vivek also expressed his disappointment on another tweet online over the issue, especially since ZEE5 asked him to subtitle their entire catalogue. He was unable to do so, due to the sheer volume of work (which was understandable). And now, the QC team has gone ahead and done this. This will not endear the platform to any subtitler/ dedicated screenwriter.
The subtitlers are one of the few people who are usually heavily affected during OTT releases since their work ends up getting the most changes. And they are rarely consulted about the changes, if ever, and this has been a regular occurrence over the past several months, especially on major OTT platforms such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and ZEE5. Hopefully, with multiple incidents coming out like this, we hope that this issue will get the proper attention it deserves.