I've had three tabs open all afternoon and I keep refreshing them like that's going to change anything. Carmike Cinemas pulled out first, and then this afternoon Regal and AMC and Cinemark went too, and now Sony's basically saying "well, I guess theaters can just not show it if they want," which, cool, thanks, very decisive of you.
If you've somehow missed the last three weeks: Sony Pictures got hacked back in late November by a group calling itself Guardians of Peace, and it's been a slow drip of embarrassing stuff ever since. Internal emails, unreleased movies (Annie leaked, so did the Brad Pitt one, Fury), salary spreadsheets, all of it. Yesterday the hackers put out a message referencing 9/11 and telling people to stay away from theaters planning to show The Interview on Christmas Day. Today, one by one, the biggest chains in the country decided they didn't want to find out if that was a bluff.
Here's my actual opinion on this, and I don't think it's a popular one: the hackers didn't shut down the release. The theater chains did that themselves, in about six hours, because some lawyer somewhere ran the numbers on liability versus a Seth Rogen comedy nobody was that excited about anyway. I wasn't planning to see it. I'm not really the audience for Franco-and-Rogen-play-themselves movies, never have been, that whole genre does nothing for me. But that's beside the point.
What gets me is how fast "we take these threats seriously" turned into "we're pulling the movie entirely," with basically zero public information about whether the threat was even credible. Nobody I've read today has any actual evidence the hackers can do anything beyond, you know, hacking. There's a difference between "some group on the internet said something scary" and "there is a specific operational plan," and as far as I can tell nobody outside a few federal agencies knows which one this is. Doesn't matter now I guess. Sony killed the Christmas release a few hours ago, for real, the whole thing.
I've been doing this blog for three years now and I've watched a handful of stories eat the entire tech news cycle like this, not because the actual facts change hour to hour, but because everyone's chasing the same six details and just rephrasing them with a new headline every time somebody at Sony issues a memo. My Twitter timeline today is just journalists retweeting other journalists' summaries of the same wire story. It's exhausting to watch, and I say that as someone who is, admittedly, also typing about it right now instead of doing literally anything else on my Wednesday night.
The part that actually worries me a little isn't the movie itself. It's the precedent. If a threat with basically no verified backing is enough to get every major chain to fold in a single afternoon, that's a very cheap way to kill a release next time, and there will be a next time. It doesn't even need to be a real hack. It just needs to sound plausible enough that a risk management team says no.
Separately, and I know this is a nothing detail compared to everything above, but Instagram quietly announced last week that they've crossed 300 million monthly users, more than Twitter now claims. Nobody's talking about it because of all this, but that's a real shift, and I think people are going to look back on 2014 as the year Twitter stopped being the default photo-sharing-adjacent app for anyone under 25. My cousin doesn't even have a Twitter account. She's got Instagram and Snapchat and that's the whole list.
Anyway. I don't know how the Sony thing ends. Maybe it leaks online in a few weeks anyway, maybe it just quietly disappears and becomes a trivia question five years from now. Either way I'm going to go make dinner and stop refreshing Twitter, which is advice I should probably take more often than I do.