Variety‘s Andrew Wallenstein is reporting that Warner Bros. CEO Kevin Tsujihara, already notorious for committing Warner Bros. whole-hog to a cornucopia of superhero comic-book movies for the next several years, confessed yesterday to thinking and acting in a (how to put this diplomatically?) chickenshit fashion when Sony Pictures was being plundered by the North Korean hack and particularly when George Clooney tried to get the other big studios to rally round.

Warner Bros. CEO Kevin Tsujihara during yesterday’s Code Media speech in Dana Point.

“It all happened so fast [but] we could have and should have done more, for [Sony chairman] Michael [Lynton] and Sony,” Tsujihara said at the Code Media conference Wednesday in Dana Point. “But you get caught up in ‘Is this going to become Whack-a-Mole? When you get lawyers and people in the room, things don’t happen.”

Translation: “I wanted to man up and do more, but after talking with lawyers and others with cautious attitudes and gelatinous backbones, it seemed safer and more prudent for Warner Bros. to let Lynton and the Sony people duke it out and fend for themselves. But for what it’s worth I feel kinda badly about it now.”

Shakespeare version: “And gentlemen in England now a-bed / Shall think themselves accursed they were not here / And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks / That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.”