Sony To Release 'The Interview' On Crackle

Looks like the terrorists haven't won after all: Sony announced on Sunday that though they pulled the The Interview from release on Christmas Day due to threats from hackers thought to be from North Korea, they will be releasing The Interview on Crackle, a property they own. Crackle might be foreign to you, or you only know it as the home of Jerry Seinfeld's Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee (which is pretty good). No word yet why they decided to quietly release The Interview on Crackle; perhaps a combination of mocking on Saturday Night Live AND an address from POTUS himself condemning Sony for folding to the threat, which Obama called a "mistake."

Before the NY Post reported that The Interview would make its way to Crackle, citing "unknown sources," Sony lawyer David Boies appeared on Meet the Press earlier on Sunday and did concede that Sony planned to release the film in some sort of streaming format, but he was quite vague about the whole ordeal. He did not once mention Crackle, but perhaps that news was being kept close the chest. As Boies said:

Sony has been fighting to get this picture distributed. It will be distributed. How it's going to be distributed, I don't think anybody knows quite yet. But it's going to be distributed.

Spoiler alert: it WILL be distributed (wonder how many more times he could have fit that word into a sentence). The development of the Sony hack has gone from nuts to nuttier. Of course with the suspicion that North Korea was involved, the President had to respond, and his acknowledgment of the movie release's cancellation was tied to the First Amendment (of course): "If we set a precedent in which a dictator in another country can disrupt through cyber, a company’s distribution chain or its products, and as a consequence we start censoring ourselves, that’s a problem."

Very true: freedom of expression is the reason many, especially celebrities, were so enraged by Sony's decision to pull the film from theatres—because doing so seemed to be a surrender to the threats of the so-called Guardians of Peace. Whether the Sony hack has been more of a 'cyber vandalism' as Obama called it or a terror threat, the release of the movie on Crackle might change the game. How will the GOP respond? How will James Flacco respond? We're keeping our eyes on it.