Sometime early last week hackers penetrated Sony and it seems some of the fruits of their nefarious labor have been posted online in the form of five digital screener copies of Sony’s films, many of them unreleased. The films that were stolen and posted were Fury, which came out in October, To Write Love on Her Arms, which actually had a limited festival debut in early 2012 if you can believe that but won’t receive a wider release until sometime in 2015, and as of yet unreleased films, Annie, Still Alice, and Mr. Turner. Of those two are awards contenders: Still Alice has serious Oscar buzz for Julianne Moore’s performance, and Mr. Turner, which is a big awards favorite as well. Fury has been downloaded most off of file sharing sites despite it being released already it is the film most oriented towards the crowd of people that uses such sites.
Normally I wouldn’t think twice about torrenting a film from such a huge distributor as Sony this time of year. If a film won’t be out in my area and is an awards contender I will make a last resort to torrent it online so as to see all the nominees before the show. This time I don’t believe I will do that since it’s still so early in the season and both Still Alice and Mr. Turner are slated to come out to theaters around here in mid-January so I’ll wait until then. Perhaps this leak could push up their release dates for all I know.
But the biggest reason I can’t sneak an early peek at these is because North Korea is suspected in this leak, perhaps in retaliation for Sony making The Interview, a film starring Seth Rogen and James Franco who do a talk show and are tasked by the CIA to assassinate Kim Jong-un. The North Korean leader is pissed. While he doesn’t allow his citizens to consume western culture he loves it. I have to imagine this is as big or perhaps a bigger hit to him as are sanctions and UN condemnations. The Interview was not one of the films leaked and will be released on Christmas this year. However, if this is true it represents a big step up for North Korea’s nefariousness and a risk to the world if they become better and more apt at hacking and leaking more important information. I also have no interest in Annie, that looks horrible, and it’s not being downloaded much, just over 200,000 times according to Variety. North Korea can have that.
midwestmovieman 