Sony has announced that it has canned the upcoming film The Interview out of fear for potential retaliation from North Korea. The film won't be screened in any theaters, won't be sent to reviewers and won't be streamed online. For now, a multi-million-dollar, star-studded, terrible-looking (but not uniquely so) film has been completely dropped, because North Korea didn't like it.
US intelligence agencies have determined "with 99 percent certainty" that hackers working for the North Korean government were behind the Sony Pictures attack, and the same hackers were threatening "9/11 style attacks" on theaters that agreed to play the movie.
It isn't a surprise that the North Korean government doesn't like the movie - try finding something, anything that they do like, other than something that worships their state. And it's not a surprise that the DPRK government has threatened retaliation - after all, this is a country whose capital city is literally plastered with anti-American propaganda posters and whose inflated sense of global power leads them to make vast, empty threats every week. All things considered, it turns out that it wasn't even that surprising that they were able to hack Sony - as recent revelations have showed, Sony had been subject to a variety hacks over the past few years, and it was particularly vulnerable to a coordinated cyber attack like the one that happened to have been organized by the DPRK government, but which could have just as easily come from, say, China or Russia.
What is surprising is that Sony folded. Twitter has been particularly unkind to the film giant for taking North Korea's bluffs at their word and pulling the film, and Buzzfeed tracked down some reactions:
What if an anonymous person got offended by something an executive at Coke said. Will we all have to stop drinking Coke?
— Judd Apatow (@JuddApatow) December 17, 2014
Dear Sony Hackers: now that u run Hollywood, I'd also like less romantic comedies, fewer Michael Bay movies and no more Transformers.
— Michael Moore (@MMFlint) December 17, 2014
Damn. Bad guys won RT @nytimes: Breaking News: Sony Pictures Cancels Holiday Release of ‘The Interview’ After Threats http://t.co/lxdhYQpUzY
— mia farrow (@MiaFarrow) December 17, 2014
Canceling "The Interview" seems like a pretty horrible precedent to set.
— Zach Braff (@zachbraff) December 17, 2014
Damn, Sony. Even Zach Braff is pissed about this one. Pulling Interview has already had detrimental affects on other studios seeking to cover North Korea, as this tweet about NBC shows:
JUST IN: Source tells @NBCNews that a New Regency/Fox film about N. Korea, titled “Pyongyang" & starring Steve Carell, has been shut down.
— CNBC Now (@CNBCnow) December 18, 2014
The ironic part of this story is how terrible and disgusting the film itself looks (check out the trailer if you don't believe us.) Making "Dong" jokes about Dadong, China, is the kind of humor that would get rejected from an Austin Powers movie for being too 'low brow.' But Sony's willingness to cave in to DPRK threats is a bad sign for any future studios seeking to cover North Korea. The above Steve Carell movie 'Pyongyang' wasn't going to be an idiotic Seth Rogen movie, but a "paranoid thriller" that may have actually interested people in the weird, totalitarian world that is North Korea.
North Korea is an important subject for films, and it's one that filmmakers should have the freedom to explore, whether in a serious, meaningful way or a stupid, empty Katy Perry-addled "desperately unfunny" comedy (looking at you, The Interview.) The fact that a handful of embarrassing leaked emails and some empty threats were enough to potentially evaporate an entire genre of films - and one that involves one of the most oppressive regimes on the planet - is a loss for both filmmakers and movie goers alike.
In the meantime, if you need your "mocking North Korea" fix, we recommend a theater in Fort Worth, Texas, which will be airing "Team America World Police" instead. Close enough.
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