Ex-Sony Executive Reveals How Seth Rogen's The Interview Triggered a Hollywood Reckoning

You do not often hear a former studio boss call one of his own movies the biggest mistake of his career. Michael Lynton just did exactly that about The Interview, and he has the scars, the hacked servers, and a call from a sitting president to back it up.

The confession

Lynton, who ran Sony Pictures Entertainment, says an excerpt from his upcoming memoir, From Mistakes to Meaning: Owning Your Past So It Doesn't Own You, that greenlighting Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg's 2014 comedy The Interview is the decision he regrets most. The movie, directed and written by Rogen and Goldberg with Rogen co-starring alongside James Franco, follows a pair of TV interviewers recruited by the CIA to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. On paper, raunchy high-concept comedy. In practice, an international incident.

Lynton writes that even President Barack Obama picked up the phone to question the choice:

"What were you thinking when you made killing the leader of a hostile foreign nation a plot point? Of course that was a mistake."

According to Lynton, the impulse to say yes came from wanting to fit in with the cool kids rather than play corporate hall monitor. He puts it this way:

"Just for a moment, I wanted to join the badass gang that made subversive movies. For a moment, I wanted to hang — as an equal — with the actors. I had grown tired of playing the responsible adult, of watching the party from the outside while I played Risk. My middle-school self took over, and my adult self lost the courage to disappoint the other kids. The party got out of hand, and the company, its employees, my family and I all paid dearly."

The hack, the exodus, the mess

North Korean cyberterrorists retaliated by breaking into Sony's systems and dumping everything: private emails, unfinished scripts, even completed films. The fallout dinged reputations across town. After unflattering executive emails surfaced, A-listers like Will Smith, Adam Sandler, and Angelina Jolie parted ways with the studio. C-SPAN counted 47,000 unique Social Security numbers spilled from Sony's network. Amy Pascal, then head of Sony's Motion Pictures Group and co-chair of the company, was fired in 2015 and quickly shifted into a producing deal. Lynton hung on until 2017, then exited to become CEO of Snap, the company behind Snapchat.

What the leaks spilled (and why it still matters)

• Early internal talk of bringing Spider-Man into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which officially became real in February 2015
• A Men in Black and 21 Jump Street crossover that never materialized
• The script for Spectre, the James Bond outing
• Full copies of upcoming Sony releases: Fury, Annie, Still Alice, Mr. Turner, and To Write Love on Her Arms

A release plan born under duress

With theaters wary of potential attacks if they played The Interview, Sony pulled the traditional rollout. Instead, the studio dropped it on digital PVOD on December 25, 2014, making it the first major Hollywood title to debut that way — six years before the COVID-19 pandemic would normalize at-home premieres.

For something that looked like just another envelope-pushing comedy, The Interview reshaped careers, yanked studio skeletons into daylight, previewed future superhero deals, and accidentally beta-tested a release strategy the entire industry would later depend on. Lynton calls it the call he wishes he had never made. The rest of Hollywood is still living with the aftershocks.