As usual, I’m of two minds about Sony pulling The Interview following the not-terribly-credible threat of violence against theaters should they choose to show the film.

On the one hand, the problems of having a terrorist’s veto are obvious. How un-credible does a threat have to be in order to cause a studio to pull a film?

Try unclouding the issue here by considering what would happen if a real-deal terrorist group decided to file a threat over a non-grievance-related movie. For instance, if ISIS said they would blow up a theater that shows The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies, what would happen? On the one hand, ISIS is much more serious than the Guardians of Peace. On the other hand, why would they care about The Hobbit? I don’t know what the answer is–I don’t know how that would play. But I think that before you can come up with a real position on The Interview, you need to answer the ISIS/Hobbit scenario, first, because it clarifies the question.

As for the issue of precedent-setting, I’m not overly concerned. Hollywood will re-discover its courageous commitment to free speech and artistic integrity the next time they have a movie which insults, degrades, and offends Christians. Can’t stop the signal. Besides, the West hasn’t exactly covered itself in glory on these questions over the last couple of decades, from The Satanic Verses to the Danish Muhammad cartoons to the Red Dawn remake that changed the Chinese villains to North Korean villains so as not to offend China.

Grievance calculus is terribly complex.

I’m being flip here, but the truth is that I’m very, very sympathetic to Sony and the theater owners and if I were in their position, I would have done something very similar. Because this threat–however un-credible it is–points to an existential vulnerability of modern film-making.

From the moment of the Aurora shooting on the opening weekend of The Dark Knight Rises, people have been trying to figure out how much the attack hurt the movie’s gross. No one knows for sure, but the answer seems to be “more than nothing.”

So if you were an executive at AMC, looking down the barrel of the Christmas weekend–one of the biggest weekends of the year for moviegoing–you understood that even a threat of violence had the potential to really hurt attendance–not among people skipping The Interview (which looked like a bomb anyway) but adults and families staying away from The Hobbit and Into the Woods, etc.

But the risk to theater operators is actually much greater than just this one weekend. In the extremely unlikely event that there was a pre-meditated terrorist attack on a movie theater, it could destroy the industry. After 9/11, people flew because they had to. The alternatives to flying aren’t really comparable in terms of time and money.

People don’t need to see movies in theaters. Everyone has a 55″ flat-screen TV at home with blu-ray and streaming. (Not really “everyone,” but you get the point.) Movies come to home distribution just a few months after their theatrical runs and it’s actually cheaper to buy the blu-ray than it is to buy two tickets to the theater. A terrorist attack carries with it the potential to permanently alter Americans’ movie-going habits. Hollywood would have to be crazy to risk that.

In one of the stories about The Interview a security consultant was quoted noting that while America has done a good job “hardening” big sporting events and airports, lots of targets–like shopping malls and movie theaters–remain soft, and are in need of hardening.

Maybe I’m wrong, but I suspect that people would not tolerate the “hardening” of the multiplex. They’d just stay away from it.

Which points to the real problem: You cannot “harden” the whole of American life. That’s a logistical impossibility in a country this size. What you could do, in theory, is harden the American people. But I’m doubtful about that, too. This isn’t a judgment; just an observation.

As a wise man once said, “Peace has cost you your strength; victory has defeated you.”

End Notes: 

(1) I’m not convinced that it really is the North Koreans behind the Sony hack. I’m more-than-halfway persuaded that this is a disgruntled employee and hactivist group effort which has nothing to do with the Norks.

(2) Mitt Romney–Mitt Romney!–had the nearly perfect answer: Immediately stream The Interview, for free, and make a point about giving the finger to whoever is behind the threat. I’d go one step further and say that streaming should also be hosted off of WhiteHouse.gov, just to make sure people get the point about where the government is on the issue, too.

Mitt 2016: Third time’s the charm!