Extra, Extra!: The Interview Coming to Netflix (And Sooner Than You Might Think)

In which I report on the latest in entertainment news.

Netflix announced on Tuesday that the highly controversial film The Interview will be available to stream as of January 24th.  Come Saturday, you can be sitting down to the Seth Rogen / James Franco comedy from the comfort of your own living room.

With the unprecedented uproar that the film caused, it's easy to forget exactly why that it.  And no, it's not just because Kim Jong-un is an unstable dictator who takes extreme offense to being made an international laughing stock (although that is certainly the case).  While cinematic satire often does take aim at the sitting rulers of unfriendly countries - such as Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator, which lampooned Hitler before the United States entered World War II - I am at a loss to think of any that revolve around his assassination, especially when turned into a farce by two of Hollywood's biggest clowns.

Months before its release, North Korea threatened to go to war against America if the film was allowed to run in theaters.  Other than a nebulous sense of unease among those who actually paid attention, these threats went unnoticed.  When North Korean hackers broke into Sony's data bases and threatened immediate and catastrophic acts of terror against theaters that chose to run the film immediately before its release, people took notice.  A number of theater chains (including AMC) refused to distribute the film at all, prompting Sony to pull distribution of the film altogether (a decision that was almost as quickly reversed).

Later this week(end), I will retrace 2014's craziest entertainment story in greater depth, but suffice it to say that North Korea balked at being so brazenly lampooned by two popular American satirists and threatened varying degrees of violence before theater chains, and eventually Sony, caved in to their demands.  Sony, realizing that the film had somehow galvanized the free-speech crowd, patched together a Frankenstein's monster of distribution in order to cover as much of the film's $44 million production costs as it could, including a hodgepodge theatrical release (mostly by smaller, independently run theaters), digital download and now Netflix streaming.

While it will doubtlessly not rank among the best films of the year, it will invariably be among the most interesting, if only for the stranger-than-fiction, geopolitical ruckus that it inadvertently caused.  It went from something that I would begrudgingly see because other people wanted to see it to something that I simply have to see just to make sense of the absolute cluster-fuck that surrounded its release.

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