Shock! Nork-grating flick The Interview WILL be in cinemas – Sony

After days of ridicule for caving into ludicrous anonymous threats against moviegoers, Sony Pictures and US cinemas will show The Interview this Christmas, after all. According to the likes of Associated Press, BBC News and Variety, the Seth Rogan comedy flick about the assassination of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un will …

[chivo243]

All a marketing stunt?

So, this whole thing has been a ruse just to ramp up interest in this movie? That's Hollywood!

[Mitoo Bobsworth]

Re: All a marketing stunt?

That thought has crossed my mind - however, when the FBI & Obama are part of the PR campaign, I have to temper my cynicism (a little).

[InfiniteApathy]

Re: All a marketing stunt?

With a bit of critical thinking you can see the risk vs reward would be very much against this being a stunt. As to who is behind it, I have yet to see anything more solid than speculation. I will admit that the FBI involvement & statements strongly points to it being NK, but, again, that is not evidence.

I'm all for some harmless tin-foil hattery, though I prefer mine to be at least plausible.

[chivo243]

Re: All a marketing stunt?

@InfiniteApathy

Should have used Joke icon, my mistake. I thought the "That's Hollywood" addition would have conveyed humor via text, which can easily be misunderstood.

[InfiniteApathy]

Re: All a marketing stunt?

@Chivo243

Ah my mistake, all good. I'm just a grumpy old fart and after seeing this "theory" bandied about seriously, it raised my hackles.

El-Reg is my favourite source of snark and wit, I would be loath to have it sullied.

[Mark 85]

Re: All a marketing stunt?

It does make one wonder, doesn't it? And with the government involved and then there's the threat of lawsuits over from Sony, I do have to wonder who's running this show. Everyone's credibility is running thin at this point.

Who else has had their chain yanked by Sony? The theater owner's and insurance companies? A couple days ago, they were running scared (or so it would seem from the reports).

Has Orwell's Animal Farm finally come to fruition? Seems that the big corporates are now "more equal" than even the governments.

This all just raises more questions than it answers... even yesterday's NK internet problems raises questions.

Nope, I still won't go see it. Even if it were free admission and popcorn. :p:p:p

[veti]

Re: All a marketing stunt?

I firmly believe that the original threat was genuine (in the sense that it was made by someone who loves the NK government more than Sony). And that prompted some spineless cinema chains to announce they wouldn't show this movie, bumping it probably for something with more explosions.

But how Sony responded to that, all the publicity we've seen since that happened? That, I assume, must have been entirely orchestrated by someone at Sony who subscribes to the view that there's no such thing as bad publicity.

[PNGuinn]

Re: All a marketing stunt?

"... someone who loves the NK government more than Sony..."

You mean a substantial part of the thinking world then?

[Robert Helpmann??]

Re: All a marketing stunt?

"Once considered to be a near-certain box office dud that even Sony executives apparently agreed was poor, the movie has rocketed to the top of the crowd-sourced Rotten Tomatoes and the IMDB rankings."

That, I assume, must have been entirely orchestrated by someone at Sony who subscribes to the view that there's no such thing as bad publicity.

Yes, someone was clearly awake during the PR 101 class taught at the P. T. Barnum School of Media, Entertainment and Advertising. Using Brendan Behan's version as a caution, though, Sony should keep in mind "there's no such thing as bad publicity except your own obituary."

[jai]

Re: All a marketing stunt?

*cough* The Producers *cough*

http://uproxx.com/tv/2014/12/mel-brooks-on-the-interview-vs-the-producers-i-waited-til-hitler-was-dead/

[Ketlan]

Yawn...

I'm already bored with this film and I haven't even seen it.

[John Jennings]

Nice to see

The Vulture landing on the Twit

But kiss and make up with old Steve Gibson

[DiViDeD]

Hurrah! Now my Christmas is complete!

I was sooo worried that on Christmas day I wouldn't be able to see this film because it wasn't available in the cinema.

Now I'll be able to spend Christmas day not watching it because it's a piece of Seth Rogan crap I wouldn't watch with a gun to my head.

Huzzah! There IS a doG after all.

Although I imagine there will be cinemas full of people sitting through two hours of excruciatingly dire comedy in order to show their 'solidarity'

[Anonymous Coward]

Team America!

Freedom wins once again, Team America, fuck yeah!

[Anonymous Coward]

Meh. I'm going to wait for the Hustler's porn parody:

"“If Kim Jong-un and his henchmen were upset before, wait till they see the movie we’re going to make,” said Hustler founder and chairman Larry Flynt. “I’ve spent a lifetime fighting for the First Amendment, and no foreign dictator is going to take away my right to free speech.”"

A porn parody fuelled by distilled spite. Now that is a proportionate and properly American response (if it even was the norks...could have been anyone)

[dan1980]

Norks. hee hee.

[The Mole]

Christmas Day

The thing that most surprises me is that cinema's are open on Christmas Day, and apparently have enough demand to pay the wages of the poor people who are desperate enough to take the overtime (I assume) working there.

[Mike Moyle]

Re: Christmas Day

Since everything else is either: A -- closed, or; B -- broadcasting an orgy of faux Christian religiosity, going out for a movie and Chinese food on Christmas day is a grand tradition for the American Jewish community.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Christmas Day

"The thing that most surprises me is that cinema's are open on Christmas Day, and apparently have enough demand to pay the wages of the poor people who are desperate enough to take the overtime (I assume) working there."

There's no surprise. Besides their generous 15 shillings per week, they get an extra lump of coal.

[Mike Moyle]

Oh... Vitter... (eye roll)

The only reason that he'd suggest running the movie at the White House would be because he'd be hoping that whomever was responsible WASN'T kidding about being able to pull off a 9/11-style attack on anyone showing it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Cinemas

So 1999

[e^iπ+1=0]

Re: Jolly Good!

'Now, could someone please tell me where I can download this film from?'

Errm, shouldn't we just wait for GOP to reveal this as their next gift to the interwebs? Or is it out there already?

[The Vociferous Time Waster]

Josh Rogan

Surely every movie with Josh Rogan in it should be considered an act of terrorism. Meanwhile the USA has been looking for an excuse to have a legitimate pop at NORK so maybe this is their excuse. Like hunting a Saudi in Pakistan was their excuse to invade Afghan and hunting WMDs that existed purely in their imagination was an excuse to invade Iraq.

[ukgnome]

>>threatened September 11th-style attacks on anyone who went to see the film.

Turkish army defeated at the gates of Vienna?

Convention of Annapolis opens with the aim of revising the Articles of Confederation?

U.S. marines invade Honduras? (these could be the one maybe)

Death of Janet Parker, war photographer, final victim of smallpox (very sinister)

Biggest one-day plunge on Wall Street?

This is just a snapshot of ON THIS DAY stuff, please can these hackers be a bit less cryptic?

[Grenou]

Why did Sony make this film in the first place,

Is this what 'freedom of artistic expression' is all about?

If it was a film about killing off The Queen, would it still be seen as 'acceptable'?

When the never ending diet of how-to-kill anything and everything so beloved of Hollywood and dished up as 'entertainment', is it any wonder people are so violent :-(

[TheProf]

And the winner is.............

The Naked Gun.

[Where not exists]

Other way

If Kim Jong-un is so upset about the movie, why doesn't he just slap a lawsuit on Sony? It worked for Hitler against Alan Cranston.

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?r107:S28FE1-0026:

[Crazy Operations Guy]

"the leak of terabytes of sensitive data"

How the hell is it possible that that much data was ex-filtrated from Sony's corporate network and no-one noticed? Do they not have competent network engineers or something?

I've worked at a company where they tallied everyone's bandwidth usage and anyone who sent more than 1 GB over the internet a day had their connection logs pulled to see exactly what was going across the wire. No system accounts were allowed to upload except in very rare cases, and even then a human being had to take ownership and full responsibility for everything that account did. It was an "Energy and Defense" contractor, so that level of security was par for the course, but there is no reason Sony couldn't do the same.

[Henry Wertz 1]

Pure speculation...

I'm wondering if it wasn't Sony management (as opposed to Sony Pictures) who decided to pull the picture, and Sony Pictures management has convinced Sony to allow it's release.

Regrarding the Sony hacks, I did hear a BBC report where they talked to a software analyst who has analyzed North Korean cyber-attacks on South Korean systems*, and thought the Sony attack was not North Korea's style. But with apparently a healthy black market for exploit code, rootkits, and so on, that may not mean much.

*I'm guessing "cyber-attack" includes everything right down to general web page defacement ("Kim was here. Hax.")

[Henry Wertz 1]

Yeah...

Yeah, I like to occasionally run etherape; you scale it so normal traffic is a fairly thin line, and it becomes pretty apparent when something odd is going on; if a machine starts looking like missile command, it's got a virus or bittorrent running, if it's got some unusually high traffic going it's pretty apparent too.

[Christian Berger]

Truning a crisis into an opportunity

This is a masterpiece of dealing with a crisis. Sony had a bad movie and horribly bad security on their hands, so they got massively hacked by some guys probably not from North Korea (but nobody actually knows). You find one of the many complaints about that movie and spin that into a narrative for pulling it from the cinema.

Nobody checks to see if movies with actual shootings get pulled (hint: they don't) so it seems plausible.

Not showing a movie for such reasons creates a huge demand which builds up, then at the peak of that hype you release the movie.

So now you have used a bad situation (being hacked) to change a movie from a projected major loss to an actual win. Plus they shifted away the attention from their bad security.