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Comment by iamsaitam | Hacker News Reader

The movie "The Green Knight" came into Germany's Netflix recently. An English movie about an Arthurian legend and you can only watch it in German without any subtitles. Ludicrous.

Can someone shed some light on the regulations in practice regarding subtitles? As an expat living in Germany, there's plenty of times that the offerings have no subtitles in English and are dubbed. Do they have to pay more license fees to include English subtitles?

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If it helps... you're not missing much. The movie is incoherent even in English, and a deep understanding of the source material.

It's a fascinating and beautiful artistic experiment, but I don't think it's a successful one. A viewer might well enjoy it better without dialogue, because the dialogue doesn't really make it any clearer.

That seems weird, I have no idea of the answer, but in the UK there's typically several audio options and several subtitle options. Stuff that's surely pretty niche in the UK even (i.e. would be surprising that they paid extra for it) like French-dubbed/subtitled originally-Hindi films.

It's strange that Netflix would do that. In Germany, they pioneered consistently offering original audio. (For instance, Amazon Prime Video was available earlier than Netflix here, and originally most of their catalogue was dubbed to German exclusively.) Plenty of services where you can rent this movie also offer it in English (OV): https://www.werstreamt.es/film/details/2097679/the-green-kni... So it may very well be some weird licensing deal where they only get to offer this specific film for streaming without a surcharge if they stick to dubbed audio.

> Do they have to pay more license fees to include English subtitles?

Yes. I asked the customer service in Japan and they told me that subtitles are licensed separately.

This frustrates me to no end. I haven't encountered the issue of having German audio only, but so often there are no English subtitles and it drives me mad.

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