The fallout continues from Sony’s decision to pull The Interview following threats from hackers with alleged ties to North Korea. Over the weekend, a lawyer for the entertainment giant said the movie will eventually be distributed but no one is saying just how this could happen.
“Sony only delayed this,” said the company’s attorney David Boies during an appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press. “Sony has been fighting to get this picture distributed. It will be distributed. How it’s going to be distributed I don’t think anybody knows quite yet, but it’s going to be distributed.”
And though Boies claims that Sony has been trying to “get the picture out to the public,” the Wall Street Journal reports that the company won’t use its own Crackle streaming video service.
However, the New York Post — which is owned by the same company as the Journal — cites sources as stating that the plan is indeed to release the movie via Crackle.
A rep for Sony tells the Journal that is the company is “still considering a number of options.”
While a number of larger theater chains exercised their option to pull out of showing the movie — a comedy about a TV personality tasked with the assassination attempt on North Korean leader Kim Jong-un — following threats against exhibitors who screened the film, some theater owners still wanted to go ahead with the release.
Then when Sony decided to delay the release — saying “You can’t release a movie unless you have a distribution channel” — a handful of theater operators wanted to show the 2004 film Team America: World Police in which a marionette version of Jong-un’s father Kim Jong-il attempts to use celebrities to obtain world domination. However, fearing blowback, Paramount forbid theaters from screening that film.
Author George R.R. Martin, who distracts himself from finishing the next Song of Ice and Fire book by also owning a small theater in Santa Fe, NM, is one theater owner who has been very critical of Sony’s actions, calling it “craven” and “cowardice.” He also was hoping to show Team America before Paramount said no.
Now that Sony is hemming and hawing about how/when it will release the movie, Martin is just saying to do what the studio had originally planned to do.
“I have been in communication with the owners and operators of other independent cinemas and arthouses, and representatives of some of the smaller chains, and I know that hundreds of these venues would gladly screen this film, if only Sony will make it available,” writes Martin. “Regal and AMC and the megaplexes may have caved, but the independents have not. Sony could have the film on five hundred screens by Christmas, if it wants to.”
by Chris Morran via Consumerist
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