The Interview Controversy

                The Interview is a new movie that stars Seth Rogan and James Franco. I haven’t seen The Interview yet and all I know about the story of it is that Seth Rogan and James Franco are hired by the CIA to assassinate Kim-Jong-Um, the leader of North Korea. However this sparked a lot of controversy throughout the world.

                The North Korean government, for obvious reasons, didn’t like this movie at all. They said that they saw the movie as a threat to them which they said they would not tolerate. A North Korean news agency asked President Obama to have the film pulled. There were some rumors that Sony Pictures made altercations to the film to make it less offensive to the Koreans. It was rumored that they were going to cut a part of the Kim-Jong-Um death scene so it wouldn’t make him as mad.

                The film was set to release on December 16 but was delayed after hackers hacked Sony. This hack stole a lot of Sony’s information about past and future movies. The hackers also threatened to bomb theatres if Sony decided to release the movie. The hackers threatened that their attack would be as bad or worse than 9/11. After these threats were made many movie theatre chains didn’t want to show the movie for fear of the safety of their customers. Sony came out and said that they wouldn’t object if theatres delayed or got rid of their movie. After many large movie chains decided not to show the movie, Sony just cancelled the release of The Interview completely. They said that they had no plans to release it at all including other ways of showing it such as Netflix or home video.

                Many people in America didn’t like Sony’s decision to pull the Interview. Many people saw it as admitting that North Korea had a lot of power over us. Freedom of Expression is a big deal in America and many people didn’t like that this freedom was taken away by terrorists. President Obama even came out and said that he thought Sony should have released the Interview. Even though I agree with what these people are saying I also understand why they decided to not release it. I believe that they didn’t really have a choice. Many of the theatres that were going to show it refused to show it. The release would then have been lowered down to just small theatres. This would have extremely lowered Sony’s revenue from the release. I thought that Sony would just wait until the whole thing dies down and then just do a full, big release of it.

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