Entertainment

Amazon Prime Video India Movies Go Missing Overnight

If you thought you’d settle in for a nice blockbuster binge Saturday evening on Amazon Prime India, you’d be in for a rude shock. Turns out, a lot of movies have suddenly gone missing from the streaming service. There’s no set pattern to which movies are missing but Legendary Pictures’ entire catalogue has disappeared. This includes movies such as Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight trilogy and the Godzilla series of films as well as other unrelated works such as The Godfather trilogy, Into the Wild and many, many more.

I first thought whether I was the only one noticing this but soon found out a few users had tweeted about this to Amazon. On their part, Amazon has acknowledged an issue with the service and has redirected users to using the web version of their shopping app and launch the movies from there instead.

So if you’re stuck for now, visit this link, search for the movie that you wanted to watch but couldn’t find on the app, and click watch now. It will start playing the movie directly in Prime’s interface.

As we continue to await what could be the cause behind this, it could boil down to being either a technical issue or a licensing issue. In Amazon’s defense here, content licensing deals are often complicated, resulting in movies and shows being permitted on apps only for a certain period of time. Once that period elapses, the said content simply disappears from the app. It’s possible a licensing agreement renewal lapse triggered the sudden disappearance of an avalanche of movies. It only makes it worse for consumers given that it happened on a Saturday night.

For a fleeting moment, I thought whether Legendary’s deal with Amazon has expired, as have deals with other studios. In hindsight, that doesn’t make sense since Legendary doesn’t even have a streaming service of its own and HBO Max isn’t present in India yet. In any case, I’ll keep you posted.