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According to Box Office Mojo, The Interview—the Seth Rogen satire at the heart of the Sony hack—has had its day in the theatres. Peaking at nearly 600 outlets in the first week of the year, riding an odd kind of patriotic support, it grossed only $150,000 last weak at about 160 theaters; total theater gross to date is just over $6 million. But the action was online, and to an unusual degree. According to CNN, the film has hauled in over $40 million in online-rentals, sparking a debate over the future of simultaneous theater and online release. Next up: Sony has reached a deal with Netflix and the film will start to roll out—cautiously—outside the US; first up, the UK and Ireland.
For those of you missed it, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler began their opening segment at the Golden Globes with a joke about North Korea, with the hack “forcing us all to pretend we wanted to see” the film. They later introduced Margaret Cho—dressed as a North Korean general—as the newest member of the Foreign Press Corps. Cho later took flak from critics and feminists for the racist stereotype, but shot back on Twitter “I'm of mixed North/South Korean descent - you imprison, starve and brainwash my people you get made fun of by me #hatersgonhate #FreeSpeech.” You go, girl.
On a more serious front, debate continues on whether The Interview should be distributed via balloon or USB into North Korea itself. Fighters for a Free North Korea, a defector-activist group and the Human Rights Foundation (HRF), a U.S.-based NGO that initiated the “Hack Them Back” campaign, ultimately launched balloons with both the movie and posters from it last week, including some incendiary quotes about the murder of Kim Jong Un. The CEO of HRF Thor Halvorssen said his goal was to send no fewer than 100,000 copies of the film into North Korea this year.
NKNews provides a more sober assessment of this strategy. Yes, the portrayal of Kim Jong Un’s monarchical excesses and foibles could be an emperor-without-clothes moment. On the other hand the film is not only tasteless, but portrays North Koreans—and Americans—in ways that could backfire. We have our doubts about Seth Rogan as a vehicle for liberation, and the NKNews piece suggests we are hardly alone.
However, Choe Sang-hun has an excellent piece at the New York Times that suggests the case for South Korean cultural product is more unambiguous. He tells the story of North Korean defector Jang Se-yul who was ultimately moved to leave as a result of binging on “Scent of a Man,” an 18-episode drama, on DVD; he subsequently has become a player in shipping DVDs back north. The reasons were more quotidien than political: not good vs. evil, but just simple qualities of life (“The kitchens with hot and cold tap water, people dating in a cafe, cars clogging streets, women wearing different clothes each day — unlike us who wore the same padded jacket, day in day out,” said another defector, Jeon Hyo-jin.) In Witness to Transformation, we noted the rising access to foreign media among defectors we interviewed. Choe cites a recent study by Seoul National University’s Institute for Peace and Unification of 149 recent defectors, showing that more than eight in 10 had been exposed to South Korean media prior to leaving. Although this could be an artifact of their closer proximity to China, or underlying disaffection, we cannot rule out that causality works in the other way as well: from media to disaffection.
In any case, it is very clear the North Koreans are taking this all very, very seriously. According to HRF, Park Sang Hak received death threats from the North specifically tied to distribution of the film via balloons and almost canceled the launch as a result. Moreover, Joongang reports that North Korean diplomats have been instructed to sway foreign governments to stop the movie’s circulation, both in theaters and by cracking down on the circulation of pirated DVDs; the South Korean daily reports they are having at least some success in places like Myanmar, where the local police in Rangon have cracked down on pirated copies of the film. The target not only of Sony but of NGOs involved with North Korea suggests that this story is far from over, and that we may have reached a new stage in the propaganda wars.
