The Interview New York premiere cancelled in wake of hacker threats
The New York premiere of The Interview, Seth Rogen and James Franco’s film depicting a fictional assassination attempt on the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, has been cancelled.
The premiere was to have taken place on Thursday at Landmark’s Sunshine Cinema in Manhattan. A spokesperson for the cinema confirmed the event had been pulled late on Tuesday US time.
The move follows a message sent earlier in the day from a group calling itself Guardians of Peace, warning audiences that they would place themselves in danger by going to see the film in a US cinema.
The online message said people who chose to see the film could look forward to a “bitter fate”, that the world would be “full of fear”, and hinted that another 9/11-style attack could be expected.
Although the film’s Los Angeles premiere last week did proceed as planned, it was a low-key affair with minimal media attention. Earlier on Tuesday, appearances by the film-makers including a Buzzfeed Brews conversation, as well as on Seth Meyers and Jimmy Fallon’s late-night talkshows, were pulled.
The scaling back of publicity came as the Carmike Cinema chain announced that it would not be screening the film, due to open in the US on Christmas Day. Shares in Carmike, as well as the country’s three other biggest cinema chains — AMC, Regal and Cinemark and Carmike — all fell after news of the threat broke.
An announcement by Sony on Tuesday said the decision whether to pull screenings lay in the hands of picturehouse owners, but added that the studio hoped to proceed with the planned nationwide rollout of the film.
Variety quotes Tom Stephenson, the CEO of Look Cinemas, saying: “If they play it, we’ll show it. Sony has a right to make the movie, we have a right to play it and censorship in general is a bad thing.”
But there is said to be growing unease among both cinema chains and rival studios that the threats may cause audiences to stay away from cinemas over one of the key weekends in the calendar.
The Department of Homeland Security on Tuesday released a statement saying it had not yet discovered evidence of an active plot against US cinemas.
Other film-makers have expressed their solidarity with the film. Tweeted Judd Apatow:
— Judd Apatow (@JuddApatow)December 17, 2014I am not going to let a terrorist threat shut down freedom of speech. I am going to The Interview.
On Tuesday, two former employees of Sony launched a class-action suit against the studio in Los Angeles, alleging the studio was negligent in guarding its computer networks and that it had plunged employees into an “epic nightmare, much better suited to a cinematic thriller than to real life”.
A highly embarrassing raft of leaked Sony emails and internal documents has been made public by Guardians of Peace over the last two weeks. US authorities are investigating the source of the hack, which North Korea denies orchestrating.
- First-look review: The Interview
- Source http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/dec/17/the-interview-new-york-premiere-cancelled-in-wake-of-hacker-bomb-threats
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