Sony screw-up
Action movie Armored, which is still playing in U.S. theatres, was available to download for free via the Sony PS3 store yesterday.
For five hours yesterday afternoon, a screw-up by someone at Sony Pictures meant that Nimrod Antal's 04.12.09 stateside released action thriller Armored starring Matt Dillon, Laurence Fishburne and Jean Reno, a movie which is still in theatres and doesn't open for another three weeks here in the U.K. - was available for a FREE download via the Playstation store. It's one thing to cock-up so badly with a movie still in theatres, but it was quite another to label it as being free but I guess it could have been worse - it could have been a movie of there's that people actually cared about seeing. Free might not have been cheap enough on this occasion. I mean if you could guarantee that I could get my two hours back before I pressed the play button then and only then, it might have been worth a shot. What seems to have happened is Sony Pictures were prepping to release Armored as an exclusive PS3 offering several weeks before it's Blu-ray/DVD release to test out their new avenue of distribution, which so far has seen only one movie released. That movie was Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs which was priced for the download consumer at $25.99, and someone pressed the wrong buttons I guess, and Armored was out of the bag for five hours. Sony CEO Howard Stringer told the New York Times on 09.11.09 that;
The process of moving to the next stage of content delivery is as inevitable as night and day, he said. And were the only company that can do this because we own hardware and content.