So I finally watched The Interview. Rented it off Xbox Video on New Year's Day for $5.99, curled up on the couch still half-recovering from whatever we drank the night before, and honestly? It's fine. It's a dumb, over-long Seth Rogen comedy with maybe twenty really funny minutes buried in ninety. I wasn't expecting a masterpiece. I was expecting the movie that got a country's entire film distribution system to flinch, and that's not really a movie review, that's a headline, and headlines rarely hold up once you're actually sitting there watching Franco do a Katy Perry bit.
But here we are three weeks later and it's not really about the movie anymore anyway.
Yesterday Obama signed an executive order slapping new sanctions on North Korea over the Sony hack, three government-linked organizations plus ten individuals, this is on top of the FBI's official finding back in December that Pyongyang was behind the whole thing. I don't think I've ever watched a government response to a movie release happen in real time before. Not a boycott, not a review-bombing campaign, an actual executive order with an actual list of names on it. That's a new one.
And it's worth remembering how fast this all moved. Sony pulls the theatrical release in mid-December after the major chains got cold feet over vague threats. Everyone loses their minds about censorship, including some people who I don't think had planned on seeing the movie anyway (myself included, if I'm honest, before this whole thing turned it into a civic duty). Then Sony reverses course a few days later and does the weird hybrid release, a few hundred independent theaters plus a same-day drop on Google Play, YouTube, Xbox Video, and Sony's own site. North Korea's actual internet dropped off the map for something like nine hours right around Christmas, which nobody has officially pinned on anyone, but come on. And now, January 2nd, sanctions. All of that inside about three weeks.
The part that sticks with me isn't the movie or even the hack itself, it's how casually everyone is now talking about a nation-state cyberattack against a private company as just a normal news cycle event. A year ago if someone told me a foreign government would allegedly break into a movie studio's servers, leak unreleased films and executives' salaries and a mountain of embarrassing emails, and then get answered with actual federal sanctions, I'd have assumed that was a movie plot itself, probably a worse one than the actual Interview. Now it's just Tuesday.
I've got some sympathy for Sony here even though the emails made a lot of their own people look bad (there was a whole thing about producer pay and some pretty ugly comments about actors that I won't rehash, you can find it easily enough). Getting your internal network gutted and then getting told by anonymous threats not to release a movie you spent forty-some million dollars making is a genuinely bad position to be in, and I think the theater chains bailing first, before Sony even asked them to, made this way messier than it needed to be. If AMC and Regal had just held their nerve none of the "give in to censorship" narrative sticks nearly as hard.
Streaming quality on the Xbox rental was rough too, which is a small complaint but a real one. Buffered twice in the first twenty minutes on a connection that handles Netflix fine, and I've got a sneaking suspicion every VOD platform pushing this release at once on the same day just wasn't built for that kind of simultaneous demand. Sony said within the first four days the movie had pulled in over fifteen million dollars in online rentals and sales, which is a genuinely strange number for a movie that, again, is just okay.
Anyway. CES kicks off in Vegas in a few days and I'm sure by next week we'll all be back to arguing about curved TVs and whatever drone company is showing off this year, which honestly sounds like a relief after the month we just had. But it feels like the ground shifted a little here, quietly, over the holidays, while everyone was busy with family and leftovers. A hack against one studio turned into an actual instrument of foreign policy. That's going to happen again. I'd bet money on it.