A banner for “The Interview”is posted outside Arclight Cinemas on Dec. 17, 2014, in the Hollywood section of Los Angeles. WASHINGTON President Barack Obama declared Friday that Sony “made a mistake” in shelving a satirical film about a plot to assassinate North Korea’s leader, and he pledged the U.S. would respond “in a place and manner and time that we choose” to the hacking attack on Sony that led to the withdrawal. The FBI blamed the hack on the communist government.
Speaking of executives at Sony Pictures Entertainment, Obama said at a year-end news conference, “I wish they had spoken to me first. … We cannot have a society in which some dictator someplace can start imposing censorship.”
Obama said he imagined situations in which dictators “start seeing a documentary that they don’t like or news reports that they don’t like.”
Sony said it had had no choice but to cancel distribution of the movie since theaters were refusing to show it. North Korea denied anew that it had hacked the studio.
“There is not any connection,” U.N. diplomat Kim Song told The Associated Press. Song criticized the film but disputed his government hacked Sony and orchestrated the movie’s shutdown: “It defamed the image of our country. It made a mockery of our sovereignty. We reject it. But there is no relation” to the hacking.