Buh-bye, movie. (Associated Press photo)
When Sony Pictures decided Wednesday to pull the plug on the release of “The Interview”, the Seth Rogen film that is believed to have inspired the devastating hack of Sony’s computer system, it was largely seen as a profoundly disappointing move.
Sony decided to cancel the movie’s theatrical release after threats of violence against theatergoers who attended showings. Those threats were made by a group calling itself the Guardians of Peace, and they claimed to be the hackers that broke into Sony’s servers and released a flood of emails, documents, unreleased films and personnel data.
U.S. intelligence sources said it indeed appeared that North Korea was behind the cyberattack . The movie is about a pair of journalists – played by Rogen and James De Franco – who land an interview with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un, and then are recruited by the CIA to assassinate him.
After “The Interview’s” cancellation, there was a feeling that “the terrorists won”. I heard many say – both in person and online – that while they might not have wanted to see the film before, they now were dying to watch it. And not out of curiosity or because the movie had suddenly become news. Instead, it’s a matter of defiance. The notion that hackers from North Korea would be able to control what movies U.S. audiences see is outrageous.
Sony pulled its theatrical release because of perceived safety issues, but there should be no such qualms about making it available through video-on-demand or via streaming services, such as iTunes or Amazon On Demand, right? Sony might still be able to recoup some cash on the picture, and indeed the film’s new notoriety would likely make it a hit, even if most reviewers who’ve seen early screenings say it’s not very good . At Rotten Tomatoes, which aggregates reviews, it rates a low 47 percent on the Tomato Meter – but its Audience Score is 96. That’s the percentage of people visiting the site who say want to see it. I suspect that number wasn’t nearly as high before the film’s cancellation.
But you may not get the chance to see it at all. Sony officials say they have no plans to release “The Interview” in any form – including on-demand and streaming. That decision may have been helped along by the hesitance of distribution networks. Would Apple or Amazon step up and stream the film, or would they shy away because of its controversial nature? Here’s a clue: Comcast told the Wall Street Journal that it would not put “The Interview” on its video-on-demand service because it is “politically sensitive”. Tech journalist Glenn Fleishmann summed this up nicely, I think, in a single tweet :
Corporations are sheeple, too.
— Glenn Fleishman (@GlennF) December 18, 2014
While I don’t like Sony’s decision not to show the film in theaters (many theater chains removed it from their lineups anyway), it’s understandable. Regardless of whether the threats of violence were credible, it’s not worth putting people’s lives at risk for the sake of a silly movie. But the decision not to let people see it in the privacy of their own homes strikes me as cowardly. Sony has the ability to make the film available on its own, without third-party distribution networks – it could even use its Playstation network – sidestepping other spineless corporations.
I personally have no desire to see the film – Rogen’s juvenile, low-brow humor is more annoying than funny to me – but I don’t want to see companies cave to evildoers when there are technologically creative solutions available. Sony had an opportunity here to recover from this debacle in a graceful, and even patriotic, way. But so far, they’ve blown it.
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