Is “The Interview” a good movie? We may never know. After the theft by North Korean hackers of vast quantities of confidential emails, pay information and unreleased film scripts, the drip-drip leaking of all this to the media, and an explicit threat of terrorism, Sony Pictures has caved. It has cancelled not just the premiere and US theatrical release of the film, but also all DVD and VOD launches. Worldwide.
Sony, in short, has taken a $42m bath (plus prints and advertising costs) on the off-chance that we may laugh unacceptably loudly at the portrayal of a hyper-violent buffoon.
The cancellation of the premiere and release of the film has caused a wave of protest, especially from Hollywood insiders. Most recently, George Clooney attacked the press and Hollywood) for failing to stand up to the hackers, with Sony. Aaron Sorkin, always an eloquent defender of liberal values, complained that the US was succumbing “to an unprecedented attack on our most cherished, bedrock principle of free speech”.
Similar sentiments were expressed by Ben Stiller, Rob Lowe, Judd Apatow, Jimmy Kimmel and many others. A thriller called Pyongyang, starring Steve Carell and Gore Verbinski, has also been cancelled because 20th Century Fox has withdrawn an undertaking to distribute.
