Image via Netflix
Netflix announced her next children’s film to be released in a few months. However, it looks like Netflix didn’t do a little checking before making the announcement. Upon closer inspection of the film’s promotional material, it appears that the title of her newest film may be too inappropriate for the target age group.
Twitter user @Vanessid quote tweeted the poster for the new Netflix movie, titled Chupa. The title was intended 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 means ‘suck’.
Despite Netflix not having diverse speakers on its marketing team, Chupa was directed by a Mexican director, Jonás Cuarón, and will star the Mexican actor and Godzilla vs. Kong star Demián Bichir. This means that the people involved in the creation of this film knew the abbreviation of the word. After all, “chupa” sounds cute without context.
Unfortunately, not everyone knew and the tweet made Twitter users laugh. Especially because of the film’s tagline ‘Discover the legend’. You could imagine what first came to people’s minds when they learned what the word translated to.
This isn’t the only time we’ve seen the word ‘Chupas’ in public. This post drew public 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 who know who was involved in the film assumed that the people behind the film knew what the context was.
Chupa is an upcoming Netflix fantasy film about a young boy who discovers a chupacabra living in his grandfather’s shed in Mexico. The movie started shooting around April 2020 and finished in October 2021. However, some people pointed out that the Chupacabra is not meant to look like the hippogriff Harry Potterwhich is kind of what the poster tried to portray and was meant to look somewhat demonic or vampiric.
Chupa is scheduled to be released on Netflix on April 7, 2023.
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