Netflix has announced its next children’s film that will be released in a few months. However, it seems like Netflix didn’t do a bit of fact-checking before making the announcement. Upon closer inspection of the film’s promotional material, it seems like the title of its newest flick might be too inappropriate for the targeted age group.
Twitter user @Vanessid quote tweeted the poster for Netflix’s newest film, titled Chupa. The title was meant to be the shortened version of the word ‘Chupacabra,’ a creature based on Puerto Rican folklore. However, it was discovered that the word “Chupa” in Spanish to “suck off.”
Despite this being a case of Netflix not having diverse speakers in its marketing team, Chupa was directed by a Mexican film director, Jonás Cuarón, and will star Mexican actor and Godzilla vs Kong star Demián Bichir. Meaning that the people involved in making this film were aware of shortening the word. After all “chupa” sounds cute without context.
Unfortunately, not everyone knew about this and the tweet sparked Twitter users from having a laugh. Especially due to the film’s tagline “Discover the legend.” You could imagine what first came to people’s minds when they learn what the word translated to.
This isn’t the only time we saw the word “Chupas” in public. This post brought people’s attention to the lollipop brand, Chupa Chups, which contains the word in question. People also pointed out that the film was made by a Spanish-speaking team and that they too could shorten their words like English speakers. So Spanish-speaking users or those aware of who was involved in the film assumed that people behind the film knew what the context was.
Chupa is an upcoming Netflix fantasy film about a young boy discovering a chupacabra that’s living in his grandfather’s shed in Mexico. The film entered filming around April 2020 and finished by Oct. 2021. However, some people pointed out that Chupacabras aren’t meant to look like the hippogriff in Harry Potter, which is somewhat what the poster tried to portray, and was meant to look somewhat demonic or vampiric.
Chupa is scheduled to come out on Netflix on April 7, 2023.
Published: Mar 14, 2023 08:05 pm