Interview – Sony Pictures is pulling The Interview from its Dec. 25 release date, the studio announced in a statement on Wednesday.

The decision was the depressing climax to a weeks-long nightmare after Sony Pictures Entertainment suffered on Nov. 24 a massive and unprecedented hack of roughly 100TB of embarrassing, sensitive, and confidential data. On Monday, the group claiming responsibility for the hack, who call themselves Guardians of Peace,threatened theaters that plan on showing the film The Interview — which depicts the assassination of North Korea leader Kim Jong Un. “We will clearly show it to you at the very time and places ‘The Interview’ be shown, including the premiere, how bitter fate those who seek fun in terror should be doomed to,” the group said in a statement. “Remember the 11th of September 2001.”

Evoking the 9/11 attacks for a movie scheduled for release on Christmas appeared to be the rhetorical touch necessary to doom the movie from reaching theaters. Sony canceled all press for the film, including its New York premiere, and reportedly told exhibitors that the studio would not object if they chose not to screen the movie. Within 24 hours, that is exactly what happened, with the top four theater chains — Regal, AMC, Cinemark, and Carmike — all electing to pull the film from their theaters.

It’s going to be easy to place blame for what happened here. Some people are going to blame the theater chains for pulling ‘The Interview’ from their theaters, thus giving in to the hacker’s demands. And some people are going to blame Sony, for the pulling the movie itself, giving in to the hacker’s demands, and capping off a what had to be a horribly bizarre week for everyone involved with ‘The Interview’. Even the hackers themselves, upset with the fictional depiction of Kim Jong-un in the movie, decided to place blame first. They hacked personal and private emails, then made the now famous threat that has basically destroyed our freedom of speech. Is this really the world that we live in? No one wants to takes responsibility for their actions, and all this blaming has lead to us giving into the ridiculous demands of hackers. I do have a question for the theater chains and Sony, though. Did you really think something was going to happen here? Did you really think the same hackers who hacked into an email database would all of a sudden escalate their actions into a coordinated murderous terrorist attack? I’m no cyber terrorist expert, but if someone explicitly tells you their plans, both what the they plan to do and when they plan to do it, they’re probably bluffing. I can’t imagine many terrorist plans would be successful if they announced their attacks beforehand, but that’s what they did here, and we fell for it. The most upsetting part is that the movie industry has been making films about world leaders FOREVER. Anyone remember this film?

Released by United Artists, March 1941. pic.twitter.com/cXuLoxdivx

— mark romanek (@markromanek) December 18, 2014

That was the god damn movie poster! ‘The Interview’s’ main stars are Seth Rogen and James Franco. They are the two men on the movie poster. Neither of them are Kim Jong-un. I can go on and on about how absurd this is, and every movie site or blog is hopefully going to write the same thing, but it really is a sad day for the movies. This is going to be a popular phrase that gets thrown around until this thing dies down, but this is a horrible precedent to set, especially in the year 2014. Pulling ‘The Interview’ from theaters gives every nut job with a grudge the idea that if they don’t like something, they can protest or make threats and they’ll get what they want. The bad guys won.

– Ryan