Amazon pulls The Boys and Invincible from viewing in Singapore
By Dan Selcke
Amazon has pulled The Boys and Invincible, two of its original superhero series, from its app in Singapore, probably because they ran afoul of censors.
The Boys, a satire about a vigilante group trying to take down a cadre of morally corrupt superheroes, is one of the most popular original shows on Amazon Prime Video. It’s also vulgar, violent, and swimming in bodily fluids of all kinds, which means that it’s a hard sell in certain markets. That apparently includes the city-state of Singapore, where AsiaOne reports that Amazon has pulled the show from the Amazon app. If you’re in Singapore, you can no longer watch The Boys.
Amazon has also pulled Invincible, another violent superhero show, in the region. We don’t know exactly why, but we do know that Singapore has a pretty robust history of censorship. The government banned songs like Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl” and Peter, Paul and Mary’s “Puff the Magic Dragon,” to give you an idea of what we’re working with here. They might not take kindly to the kinds of wild shenanigans they get up to over on The Boys.
It’s an interesting situation that Amazon Prime Video finds itself in, having two hits that have become popular because of their extreme content, which plays very differently depending on where in the world you are. By way of contrast, Disney goes the opposite route and tries to keep its hits as appropriate-for-all-audiences as possible, although they run into plenty of problems too:
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