Dear Sony;
Please release “The Interview” on demand on the Playstation Network on Christmas day.
[Update: Subsequent to publication, Sony said it would not release “The Interview” at all, presumably meaning not even through VOD. The suggestions stands: do it anyway.]
If theatres debut “The Interview,” a bunch of terrorists calling themselves the Guardians of Peace threaten to bomb them. Some authorities believe the GOP might be unhinged enough to actually do it.
I would love to urge theatre owners to show the movie anyway, but I can’t in good conscience recommend that somebody else volunteer to risk being bombed.
So show it on the PlayStation network.
I have little interest in the seeing the film (okay, okay, “the package is secure” almost made me cry laughing), but if you make it available on the Playstation, I pledge to pay at least the price of admission to a movie theatre to stream it.
And between those who actually want to see the movie, and those who want to metaphorically lift a middle finger to terrorists (the former almost certainly a fully encompassed subset of the latter), I think your audience might be as big as all of America. People with Xboxes will go visit their friends with PlayStations. Guaranteed.
I was going to suggest that service providers all offer “The Interview” on VOD too, but once again, that’s volunteering someone else to get bombed. (But, hey, Comcast? AT&T? Dish? Verizon? DirecTV? Cox, RCN, Cablevision, Suddenlink, Mediacom? If you all did? Quite a gesture.)
But, you, Sony? You’re already on the hook. Put it on the PlayStation. You got nothing to lose and lots of VOD revenue to gain.
And as for you, my fellow Americans? You know what the GOP can’t do? Bomb us at home watching the flick on our PlayStations. They have no idea who among us has one, and if they did they’d have no idea who among us is actually watching. And even if they did resolve to find out, what are they going to do? Send people to Peoria and Austin and Springfield and Norman and Bakersfield to peer in people’s windows all day just in case we might rent “The Interview”? Terrorists are scum, but I doubt many of them are infinitely patient peeping Toms.
And some of us are armed, which would complicate things for them.
C’mon, Sony. Do it. You’re already gearing up for an OTT service delivered through Playstations anyway. We’re begging you to use us all as beta test guinea pigs.
Are you unprepared? Worried the service will crash and burn? Maybe some people will care, but I don’t. I will happily fork over my hard-earned cash as a counterstrike in the name of freedom, democracy, big business, and anything else that’s the opposite of terrorism. Getting the movie would be gravy. I believe millions of other Americans are also itching for an opportunity to do something to fight terrorism, just on principle.
Put it on the PlayStation.
But since we’re talking here, I would like to make a case for also allying against the GOP on linguistic grounds.
Assaults on language go back centuries. For example, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has nothing to do with democracy or republics, and it doesn’t let its people have much food, so the idea that they might be allowed any participation in how their country is run is a very bad joke.
But we should not be so jaded as to fail to denounce the thorough perversion of a group calling itself Guardians of Peace threatening to slaughter people for watching a movie.
Okay, so that movie makes fun of the supreme leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. The thing is, Kim Jong-un has for years been the Internet’s shorthand for stupidity and ineptitude.
And yet the GOP, which might or might not be under Kim’s direction, has apparently decided that the second movie made by a pair of stoners that mocks a North Korean supreme leader (see “Team America: World Police”) is the butt joke that broke the camel’s back, and they’ve decided to protect the delicate North Korean flower’s image from further damage by threatening to kill people.
There are few things worse than terrorists, but illiterate terrorist putzes trying to shut the barn door after the cows are already out definitely qualify.
Please, Sony, don’t let the illiterate terrorist putzes win. Put “The Interview” on the PlayStation. We’ll back you, I swear it.
Filed Under: Industry regulations + certifications