Deadline‘s Michael Fleming has posted a chat with George Clooney about the North Korean Sony hack debacle. Clooney says he “just talked to [Sony chief] Amy Pascal an hour ago. She wants to put [The Interview] out. ‘What do I do?’ My partner Grant Heslov and I had the conversation with her this morning. Bryan Lourd and I had the conversation with her last night. Stick it online. Do whatever you can to get this movie out. Not because everybody has to see the movie, but because I’m not going to be told we can’t see the movie. That’s the most important part. We cannot be told we can’t see something by Kim Jong Un, of all fucking people.”
So Pascal “wants” to put The Interview out and is more or less in Clooney’s corner or something like that, and yet Sony announces the movie’s not going out at all, not on VOD or online or anything. No offense but something in the equation is missing.
“What’s going to happen [as a result of this episode] is, you’re going to have trouble finding distribution,” Clooney tells Fleming. “In general, when you’re doing films like that, the ones that are critical, those aren’t going to be studio films anyway. Most of the movies that got us in trouble, we started out by raising the money independently. But to distribute, you’ve got to go to a studio, because they’re the ones that distribute movies. The truth is, you’re going to have a much harder time finding distribution now. And that’s a chilling effect.”