Comedian Seth Rogen has worn many hats over the years, from screenwriter to actor, producer, director, and more. And while promoting Steven Spielberg’s “The Fablemans” (a strong contender at next month’s Academy Awards), the funny man is also dishing about his experiences in Hollywood. You might remember that his 2013 directorial effort “The Interview,” co-directed with longtime pal/creative partner Evan Goldberg, was originally released by Sony Pictures. But hacking exploits and further threats from the government of North Korea, the leaders of which the film mocked, saw the film instead pulled from theaters leading to the pic being released on Google. The main crux of “The Interview” was that a pair of American media types were recruited by the CIA to assassinate the country’s authoritarian leader Kim Jong-un, which of course, inflamed tensions between the two countries and made Sony/everyone involved with the film a target of the hermit nation including potential attacks at screenings.
READ MORE: Seth Rogen On ‘Superbad’: “No One’s Made A Good High School Movie Since Then”
While speaking with skateboarding personalities Tony Hawk and Jason Ellis on the Hawk vs. Wolf podcast, Rogen addressed that old controversy again, but perhaps more candidly now that he had distance from it. While the move from global theatrical release to digital option seemed disastrous at the time, he was quick to say it eventually wasn’t as doom-and-gloom as they had originally thought while going through the experience.
“At the time, it was really bad and really catastrophic,” Rogen recalled on the podcast. “People we knew were getting fired from it. The head of the studio [Sony Pictures head Amy Pascal] was essentially fired from it. It really caused seismic shifts in Hollywood at the time, and I think how business was done in some ways…It kind of showed the success a movie could have in some ways if it has a full theatrical campaign and then immediately go to streaming. It streamed on Google, and I think it’s still the biggest movie that’s ever streamed on Google, which is crazy. Students come up to me and say they’re teaching it in their university class. It was wild.”
The filmmaker added it changed his perception of what constitutes being controversial: “It re-calibrated what I think is controversial. After that, I was like, now I know what it’s like. Unless the president is giving news conferences about it, that’s controversy. If someone is getting mad about it on social media, that’s not controversy. Having like the U.N. have to make a statement about it, that’s a controversy.”
Rogen is also thankful the fallout from the film’s controversy didn’t hurt his career, and things have very much cooled down since. “We were able to keep making movies,” Rogen said. “What’s crazy is now it’s on television; it’s on FX at 2 p.m. It was at one point the most controversial thing in the world, and now I’ll be flipping channels on a Sunday afternoon, and it’s just playing. I was worried maybe it would cause some longer-lasting fallout than it did.”
North Korea’s pressure campaign and threats certainly worked as Sony had spent all that money promoting the film only to pivot to digital, perhaps, pushing other studios into thinking about how they release projects, controversial or not. Oddly enough, Sony is one of the few major studios that have been openly vocal about their commitment to theatrical windows, while others are shortening windows or attempting disastrous hybrid models like the ones used by WarnerMedia. Rogen is still directing and producing other major films, including overseeing a new animated “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” film for Paramount that is set to be released on August 4, 2023. So, pissing off an entire country isn’t the career ender that you would imagine it could be.
You can listen to that full episode of Hawk vs. Wolf with Rogen below.