Sony announces The Interview will play in select theaters Christmas day, on-demand release also expected
Multiple Theaters Say They Will Screen ‘The Interview’ — Sony's The Interview is getting its day in theaters after all. — The Plaza Theater in Atlanta and The Alamo Drafthouse …
Context & Ripple Effects
After pulling the film's wide release amid fallout over the hack, Sony reversed course within a week: independent houses — the Plaza Theater in Atlanta and the Alamo Drafthouse chain among them — will screen 'The Interview' on Christmas Day, while a parallel digital release is lined up through YouTube, Google Play, Xbox Video, and SeeTheInterview.com at $5.99 to rent or $14.99 to buy.
The theater announcement rides on YouTube's earlier decision to carry the film, which gave Sony cover to open both channels simultaneously rather than choose between exhibitors and streaming. How the two windows perform together makes this the first real test of day-and-date distribution for a major-studio comedy.
First-order effects
- Independent exhibitors like the Alamo Drafthouse and Atlanta's Plaza Theater get an exclusive theatrical window on Christmas Day, while the same-day $5.99 rental across YouTube, Google Play, Xbox Video gives home viewers an alternative that bypasses the box office entirely.
Second-order effects
- Wider chains that declined to book the film face a direct test of whether their refusal cost them holiday traffic, as audiences who cannot reach an indie screening can simply rent it online instead.
- Piracy pressure compounds the pricing question: within days the film drew over 1.5M estimated torrent downloads, comparable to blockbuster-scale theft, forcing Sony's low $5.99 price point to do double duty as a piracy countermeasure.
Third-order effects
- If the combined theatrical-plus-VOD experiment performs — the film later ranked as Sony's top online film after streaming revenues reached $31M — studios gain evidence that a mid-budget comedy can skip the traditional exclusive theatrical window without killing demand, loosening the exhibition industry's grip on release sequencing.
The trend: Major-studio releases are moving toward simultaneous theater-and-streaming windows, with independent exhibitors and platform partners replacing the traditional nationwide rollout when the old model breaks down.