Former Sony Pictures Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton has a lot of regrets about the 2014 movie The Interview. The Wall Street Journal recently released a section from Lynton’s forthcoming autobiography, From Mistakes to Meaning: Owning Your Past So It Doesn’t Own You, in which he talks about how approving The Interview, an eerie comedy featuring James Franco and Seth Rogen about a plot to kill North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, was the “biggest mistake of my career” because it resulted in the notorious Sony hack.
On November 17, 2014, the chief of IT informed Lynton that 70% of Sony’s servers were irrevocably destroyed. Hackers made public stolen emails, including private data and proprietary scripts. To stop the movie’s publication, the FBI got involved with evidence that suggested North Korea was probably responsible for the attack.
Before its December 25 premiere, the film was removed from the major theater chains in the United States when hacker organizations threatened to put spectators at risk during screenings, according to a statement at that stage from The Hollywood Reporter. Eight months following the FBI’s investigation into the cyberattack, they discovered that North Korea was responsible, according to Lynton’s memoir.
The studio’s connections with well-known industry players, such as Will Smith, Adam Sandler, and Angelina Jolie, were severely damaged as a result of the repercussions. “What were you thinking when you made killing the leader of a hostile foreign nation a plot point?” asked former President Barack Obama over the phone to Lynton. “Of course, that was a mistake.”
Lynton can now admit that “my decision to greenlight a project on the fly” was his biggest error. He acknowledges that his “desire to belong” and concern for the “opinions of others” were the driving forces behind his initial decision to permit the film’s production.