Has Hollywood lost its cojones?

President Obama deemed it a "mistake"; John McCain said it set a "troubling precedent," and legal scholar/commentator Alan Dershowitz called it nothing less than a "Pearl Harbor attack on the First Amendment." Indeed, it's all but impossible to be ignorant of the raging firestorm in the wake of Sony Pictures' controversial decision to pull Seth Rogen's and James Franco's screwball satire of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, 'The Interview,'  from its scheduled Christmas Day release after the beleaguered studio became the victim of a series of vicious cyber-attacks and 9/11 style terrorist threats.   It's almost comical considering how something so seemingly innocuous can cause so much headache in our age of fast moving technology in global networking and communications.   I mean, why couldn't the North Koreans have similarly shut down "Team America: World Police" 10 years ago?

 

In one sense, 'The Interview' is no different from any other movie in the recent past that made dictators the butts of jokes, such as 'The Inglourious Basterds,' Sacha Baron Cohen's 'The Dictator' and 'Borat,' and the aforementioned 'Team America: World Police' from 'South Park' creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker.  The only crime 'The Interview' committed was that it had the misfortune to pick on a living dictator at a time who had the means to do something about it.  If this is the way things are going to be from now on, when fear of reprisals from a foreign government will be the deciding factor as to whether a movie will be made, then 'yes,' Hollywood has lost its balls.

'The Interview' never pretends to be a great movie, being just another typical R-rated comedy that's par for the course from long time collaborators Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, whose previous credits include 'Knocked Up,' 'Superbad,' 'Pineapple Express' and 'This is the End.'  It's not even an original idea, since it was inspired by Dennis Rodman.  You see, Kim Jong Un is a fan of NBA basketball and invited ex-Piston/Bull/Laker Dennis Rodman to his great country in a well publicized visit early this year.  So Rogen and Goldberg simply wondered: "What if a pretty CIA agent showed up at Rodman's house one day and asked him to 'take him out?'"  And she didn't mean 'to dinner' or 'out for a drink.'  Insert tabloid news reporters for NBA washouts here. 

Sony's outright capitulation is a 'game changer,' because beneath all the indignant rhetoric that's going on in Hollywood and Washington right now is the creeping and helpless realization that things have changed and will never be the same again. Studios will now be more sensitive to other countries' feelings and avoid portraying their dictators in a negative light, which means we have seen the last of films like 'The Interview' and 'Team America: World Police' because of the constant fear of repercussions.