Guardians Of Peace asked for “immediate” action and got it

Dec 20, 2014 08:25 GMT  ·  By
Sony starts removing all traces of "The Interview" from official channels
8 photos
   Sony starts removing all traces of "The Interview" from official channels

US President Barack Obama has said, in light of confirmation that North Korea was behind the Sony Hack of last month, carried out by the group Guardians Of Peace, that he believes Sony Pictures “made a mistake” in pulling the action comedy “The Interview” from theaters. But Sony isn’t stopping here.

Sometime before the President addressed Sony’s decision to yank the film from its Christmas release schedule and from international markets, as well as DVD and VOD (Video On Demand), the hackers sent a couple more messages to studio executives, congratulating them on their decision and making even more demands.

One of them was that they pulled all promo materials for the film from their official channels. Sony has given in again and did just what it was asked to.

“The Interview” website and trailers are gone

Today, all Sony Pictures official channels for “The Interview” are no longer available. The same goes for the trailers from the official channels though, for the time being, you can still see them on other channels.

The websites theinterview-movie.com and theinterview-movie.net now take visitors directly to the Sony Pictures page, while the Facebook page of the film has been deleted completely. There still is a Twitter account for “The Interview” but it’s no longer showing any tweets.

Again, the Guardians Of Peace had asked Sony that it remove “everything related to the movie, including its trailers” or else face a new batch of leaked information, from those thousands of files stolen in the November breach.

“Now we want you never let the movie released, distributed or leaked in any form of, for instance, DVD or piracy. And we want everything related to the movie, including its trailers, as well as its full version down from any website hosting them immediately,” the hackers said in the most recent message.

Sony did not waver in meeting this new demand, thus confirming what some of the biggest names in the industry have been saying: this is a very dangerous precedent of a major movie studio letting terrorists dictate the way it does business and provides entertainment.

Sony says it had “no choice”

Only hours before this new message from the hackers came and Sony pulled all “Interview”-related material from its websites, the studio was trying to defend its decision of pulling the film from theaters by saying that it was left with “no [other] choice” when theater owners started calling in to cancel it.

Initially, “The Interview” was set for a wide release on December 25, 2015, but when the email came warning theater chains with 9/11-style bombings if they ran it, Sony told the owners that it was “up to them” if they wanted to screen it or not. It would support them no matter their decision, it said, refusing to pay for extra security for those theaters that did want to run the movie still.

Within hours, most cinemas had decided to not run the film because the risks were too big, so Sony had “no choice” but to cancel it, a statement to Fox News says. In other words, Sony tried to make it sound as if it didn’t pull the movie because it gave into pressure from the hackers but because they no longer had any partners to screen it.

Sony is yet to explain its most recent decision of pulling all material related to the film from the web. As of now, it’s uncertain whether it will be going after all those other YouTube channels still hosting the trailers and teasers, but chances are this is where things are headed.

Sony's The Interview film, 2014 (8 Images)

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