Sony releases The Interview across UK cinemas after film pulled over hacking

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/feb/05/the-interview-release-uk-cinema-sony-hack-north-korea

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British cinema audiences will finally be able to see for themselves what all the fuss was about when The Interview, a comedy about two hapless US journalists’ attempts to assassinate the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, is released on over 200 screens across the country on Friday.

Unlike in the US, where Sony initially pulled the film from distribution for fear of further retribution from the suspected North Korean hackers who called themselves the Guardians of Peace, the film will get a full cinema release in the UK.

Despite Sony back-tracking on its decision to pull the film after the decision drew criticism from President Obama for caving into terrorist demands, the film was only given a very limited theatrical release in the US, shown in only around 500 cinemas instead of the planned 3,000.

It was made available to purchase via on-demand services and has already been rented or downloaded 4.3m times and has taken $40m from digital sales and over $6m from cinema takings. Sony have now claimed it is the “No 1 online film of all time”, and with the The Interview costing $44m to make, all production costs have already been recouped.

In fact, the whole saga has revealed to have come at barely any financial cost to Sony at all. Announcing their third quarter results on Thursday, Sony said the hack would cost just $15m in “investigation and remediation costs” and that it doesn’t expect to suffer any long-term consequences, though several employees are believed to have filed lawsuits against the company for failing to protect their personal data.

However, as the furore around the film and the often embarrassing revelations that emerged from the hack of the private emails of Sony staff and the personal records of around 47,000 employees has now died down, there are doubts about how commercially successful it will be in the UK once it finally lands in cinemas.

Sony has taken a soft approach to the release of the film in Britain. The studio has not put on any pre-screenings, or sent out any copies to UK critics. Similarly, no interview opportunities with the cast have been offered to the media, with both James Franco and Seth Rogen notably absent from the talk show circuit.

Speaking recently at Sundance festival in New York, Franco said the whole saga had affected his health. “There was this pressure,” he said. “There was so much attention on it – attention on a level you never expected. It was a shock to my system, and I got sick”.

Charles Gant, a box office expert, said: “First of all, because the film was mainly going out simultaneously on video on demand in the US, the theatrical release was a very modest portion of the pie, whereas in the UK they’ve taken a totally different strategy and I don’t know the reasoning behind that.

“In terms of box office amount, it should be bigger than the US just by virtue of a wider release. But in terms of how well it will do? On the one hand it has a big curiosity factor because it generated an awful lot of coverage in the run up to Christmas, but on the other hand, that has really died down now.

“I for one would have been really excited and curious to see this film in December but I am a lot less excited to see it now, and I have my doubts that that curiosity factor will translate into box office success now that the fuss has died down.”

Picturehouse cinemas said they were showing The Interview in two of their cinemas, The Ritzy in Brixton and the Hackney Picturehouse. Both are scheduled for a week, with two screenings a day. It had been a standard programming decision, said a Picturehouse spokesman, judged on whether there was demand for the film from the local audience. “In this case, of course there has been increased interest in The Interview because of all the news about it,” the spokesman added.