Unless that Indiegogo campaign to topple his regime succeeds, Kim Jong-Un will presumably still be the Dear Leader of North Korea in 2016. That’s the good news for Sony, which announced today that it will release The Interview on Crackle, its first time on an ad-supported free streaming platform (as opposed to an ad-free subscription streaming platform, or a VOD platform, or on DVD), some time next year. “We are proud to be the first to distribute the film directly to consumers in the ad-supported window,” Crackle general manager Eric Berger tells Variety in a remarkable display of hair splitting.
The bad news is that the fervor that surrounded the film around the time of its Christmas almost non-release has dissipated, replaced instead by conflicting intelligence reports, class-action lawsuits, and an exciting new Seth Rogen-based controversy. So by the time Sony ends up making the movie available to consumers who didn’t bother to see it in any of the other myriad, ad-free outlets previously available to them, they may find that there are no consumers left to care. However, having brought this one back from the dead once, Sony is seemingly determined to make everyone on Earth watch it before it lets it die again. In other words, look out for The Interview on an in-flight movie near you.