So Sony blinked again, and this time it blinked the right way. This afternoon they announced The Interview is actually coming out on Christmas Day after all, just not the way anybody planned it back in September. A few hundred independent theaters that still wanted to show it can, and if you're not near one of those (I'm definitely not, the closest indie house to me shows mostly foreign films and the occasional Studio Ghibli re-release) you'll be able to rent it online instead. YouTube Movies, Google Play, and Xbox Video are all carrying it, plus Sony's own site that they apparently built specifically for this. Rental's $5.99, buying it outright is $14.99.
I want to sit with that for a second because it's genuinely strange. A week and a half ago this movie didn't exist as far as the release calendar was concerned. Sony pulled it entirely after the big theater chains (Regal, AMC, Cinemark, Carmike) all backed out following threats tied to the hack, and for a few days there it looked like a Seth Rogen comedy had just been erased from 2014 by a group calling themselves Guardians of Peace. The FBI came out on Friday and formally said North Korea was behind the original hack. Obama stood at a podium the same day and said flat out that Sony made a mistake pulling the film, that you don't set a precedent where a threat like that gets to dictate what gets shown in this country. And now four days later there's a workaround that involves Xbox Video, of all platforms, being part of a story about free expression. I don't think anyone writing the original threat letter saw that coming, and honestly neither did I.
Here's my actual opinion, not just a recap: I think this is a bigger deal for how movies get released than it is for anything about North Korea specifically. Day-and-date VOD alongside a shrunken theatrical run has been the thing everybody in the industry argues about at conferences: will people still leave the house for a movie if they can rent it from their couch the same day. Usually that fight is fought slowly, one prestige indie film at a time, some Duplass brothers thing nobody outside Brooklyn has heard of. Sony just did it with a big-budget wide-release comedy under duress, out of necessity rather than strategy, and it worked well enough that theaters are apparently panicking a little about what it means going forward. Funny how the thing the industry's been circling for years might end up getting normalized by accident, because a movie about assassinating a foreign leader got threatened by hackers.
I tried to load the seetheinterview.com site around 4pm just to see what the checkout flow looked like and it was crawling, which I assume means a lot of people had the same idea I did. Didn't actually rent it. I'll wait a day or two for the traffic to die down, and also I'm still working through my last four Netflix queue items from before Thanksgiving like an idiot who adds things faster than he watches them. That's a me problem though, not a Sony problem.
One more thing I keep turning over: this is the first time I can remember a genuinely mainstream American movie release becoming a news story that had nothing to do with the movie itself being good or bad. Nobody's talking about whether The Interview is funny. I haven't seen a single review mention the writing or the direction. It's just become this object that represents a decision about whether threats work. That's a weird position for a comedy to end up in, and it's not going away once people actually watch it and it turns out to be, from everything I've heard, a pretty mid Seth Rogen movie. The controversy is going to outlive anybody's opinion on the jokes, which feels backwards but here we are.
Anyway. It's been a heavy month for tech news that isn't really about tech, more about hacking as geopolitics, which is its own thing entirely from the CES rumors and phone leaks I'd normally be writing about this time of year. I've got eggnog going a little warm on the counter and a stack of year-end gadget roundups I still need to read before I do my own, so that's where the next few posts are probably headed. For now I'm just going to keep refreshing that rental site until it loads.