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A scene from HBO’s The White Lotus was quietly edited on the Indian streaming platform JioHotstar—and not for the reasons you might expect. The show is known for pushing boundaries with scenes involving nudity, sex, drugs, and even incest, yet the moment that was censored wasn’t one of the wild or controversial ones.
Instead, it was the very first scene, where a young character named Zion (played by Nicholas Duvernay), the son of Belinda, is shown praying in front of a Buddha statue after hearing gunshots at the resort. Originally, Zion’s prayer starts off sincerely—he begs for his mother’s safety and recites a Christian prayer. But as the gunshots continue, he panics and angrily swears at the statue, saying, “What the fk! I said, don’t let anything happen to my mother, motherfker!” That outburst was completely removed in the version shown on JioHotstar.
According to IndieWire, this cut wasn’t mandated by HBO or any Indian government body—it was something JioHotstar decided to do on its own. This kind of preemptive censorship is actually pretty common in India. Streaming platforms there often edit content themselves in order to avoid potential backlash, especially when religion is involved.
In India, theatrical films have to go through official censorship by the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC), but streaming platforms follow a looser, self-regulated system. Since 2021, they’ve been operating under the “Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code,” which lays out how content should be classified and presented. However, the rules aren’t very specific, especially when it comes to religious or potentially offensive material. This gray area means platforms often play it safe by editing anything that could spark controversy.
Religious sensitivity is a big deal in India, and content involving religion—especially scenes mixing religion and profanity—tends to be treated with extra caution. Even though the guidelines don’t clearly ban such scenes, the fear of public outrage or legal trouble is enough for many platforms to cut them out altogether.
As of now, neither Warner Bros. Discovery (which owns HBO) nor JioHotstar has commented on the decision to censor the scene.