“In times of tyranny and injustice when law oppresses the people, the outlaw takes his place in history,” reads text shown in the very opening scene of director Ridley Scott's 2010 film Robin Hood starring Russell Crowe. At least, it's supposed to.
However, over the past few days, this now 15-year-old take on the classic story has gone viral on internet forums and social media.
Why? Because viewers noticed that the usual text in the movie's intro had been seemingly removed from the streaming version of the film on Amazon Prime Video.
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"Apparently Amazon/Bezos has edited out the opening exposition text from Robin Hood (2010)," read one post with more than 1 million views on X.
Dozens of other X posts on the topic also went viral with hundreds of thousands of views.
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It wasn't just on X either. On Reddit, users posted about the removal of the Robin Hood text, with one viral post on the subreddit r/movies receiving nearly 4,000 upvotes. Amazon users even took to the official Amazon forums to complain about the issue.
This may seem like a trivial online conspiracy, but viewers weren't wrong about the missing intro. Users took screenshots and screen recordings to show how the Ridley Scott film's intro was supposed to look and then compared it to the Prime Video version.
In these conspiratorial times, viewers were quick to blame Jeff Bezos, the billionaire who founded Amazon. In February, Bezos decided to get involved with editorial decisions at The Washington Post, which he owns, in order to revamp the editorial section with a libertarian bent. Furthermore, Bezos was also one of the big tech founders to donate $1 million to Trump's inaugural fund earlier this year.
Some online wondered: With the removal of Robin Hood's blatant anti-authoritarian message, was this a sign of censorship to come?
Thankfully, that does not appear to be the case. A source at Amazon tells Mashable that viewers reporting the missing text were likely watching the Ultra High Definition version of the movie on Prime Video. When the film distributor provided Amazon with the movie in 2020, it apparently sent a version of Ridley Scott's Robin Hood that did not include the opening quote. The source told Mashable that Amazon has since requested the correct version of the movie with the intro text intact.
As of this writing, it appears that Amazon has now fixed the issue, and the correct version of Robin Hood with the opening message is now streaming on Prime Video.
