"The Interview" remains in a holding pattern. The Seth Rogen-James Franco movie will not premiere in theaters on Christmas Day as originally planned, but Sony has not given up the fight to distribute the film in some capacity.
"Sony only delayed this," David Boies, Sony's attorney, said on "Meet the Press" on Sunday. "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."
The studio has not announced definite plans to release the movie on DVD or via Video-on-Demand. The company did deny a New York Post report that the movie would stream for free on the Sony-owned website Crackle, according to CNN. Other options for release include video streaming services or any theaters willing to show the movie.
Sony pulled the movie's release on Wednesday, Dec. 17 after hackers, known as "Guardians of Peace, " threatened a 9/11-type attack on theaters that planned to show the film, which depicts the death of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. Many in the entertainment industry and even President Barack Obama criticized the studio's decision to cancel the release.
The FBI confirmed a couple days later that the country of North Korea was responsible for the hack on Sony Pictures Entertainment. The "tools and infrastructure" used by the hackers matched previous cyber attacks linked to the North Korean government, according to Reuters.
North Korean has denied any involvement and, at first, the country's foreign ministry expressed interest in a "joint investigation" with the United States to find the real perpetrators, according to BBC News. The U.S. ignored the country's request.
"If the North Korean government wants to help, they can admit their culpability and compensate Sony for the damages this attack caused," US National Security spokesman Mark Stroh said on Dec. 20.
The next day, North Korea reversed course and started launching threats against the United States. It also accused the U.S. government of being "deeply involved" in the making of "The Interview."
"The DPRK has already launched the toughest counteraction," according to a statement released to the North Korean state-run news outlet KCNA, via CNN. "Nothing is more serious miscalculation than guessing that just a single movie production company is the target of this counteraction. Our target is all the citadels of the U.S. imperialists who earned the bitterest grudge of all Koreans."
The statement continued, "Our toughest counteraction will be boldly taken against the White House, the Pentagon and the whole U.S. mainland, the cesspool of terrorism."
The report by the KCNA also referenced the "fighters for justice" including the "Guardians of Peace" and said they "are sharpening bayonets not only in the U.S. mainland but in all other parts of the world."
Obama has classified the Sony hack as "an act of cybervandalism," he told CNN in an interview that aired on "State of the Union." He also said he would have reached out to movie theaters and distributors if Sony had spoke with him directly.
"I was pretty sympathetic to the fact that they have business considerations that they got to make," the president said. "Had they talked to me directly about this decision, I might have called the movie theater chains and distributors and asked them what the story was."
