10 Movie Conspiracy Theories You Won't Believe Exist

Cast your mind back to late 2014 and the furore that erupted surrounding the Sony Pictures hack and its forthcoming Seth Rogen-James Franco comedy satire The Interview. It started in November when a group calling themselves the Guardians of Peace (GOP) hacked into Sony’s computer infrastructure and began leaking confidential information including employee data, unfinished movie scripts and embarrassing emails that, amongst other things, revealed producer Scott Rudin thinks Angelina Jolie is a “minimally talented spoiled brat” with a “rampaging spoiled ego”.

Then in December the GOP turned their attention to The Interview, threatening that terrorist attacks would take place if Sony didn’t pull the movie. As The Interview focuses on two hapless journalists sent to assassinate Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un, people began to suspect that the hack and subsequent threats were the work of North Korea. Sony did indeed cancel the movie’s premiere and its theatre-wide release, prompting outrage from everybody from George Clooney to President Obama who saw Sony as cowards bowing to terrorist threats. Then Sony did a complete turnaround just a few days later and decided to release the film after all in a small number of indie theatres and on VOD.

Smells fishy, at least to those who suspected perhaps North Korea wasn’t to blame and the whole fiasco was an elaborate marketing ploy devised by Sony to generate more interest in the movie. Think about it: until the proverbial hit the fan, The Interview was a run-of-the-mill Rogen-Franco comedy that might’ve raised a few laughs but would never be a film to go down in cinema history. Even Sony executives feared the movie would be a flop, deeming it “desperately unfunny” in leaked emails. But after all the hype, The Interview became a must-see purely because of the controversy surrounding it. Sony came out looking like heroes who don’t back down to terrorist hackers, ‘Murica thought it was their patriotic duty to see the movie and Sony managed to recoup some moolah on what could have been a much bigger flop.

It might beggar belief that Sony would go to such lengths as leaking its own confidential information and publicly disgracing itself just to promote a movie but as the old saying goes, ‘all publicity is good publicity’.