Ex-Sony Pictures Head Michael Lynton on ‘The Interview’ and Its Insane Fallout: ‘Biggest Mistake of My Career’

Hindsight? Hell of a drug. That’s the lesson former CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment Michael Lynton learned the very hard way more than a decade ago, and seems to only be coming fully to grips with now. The impetus: a Seth Rogen and James Franco comedy.

Let’s backtrack a bit. Lynton has a new memoir, “From Mistakes to Meaning: Owning Your Past So It Doesn’t Own You” co-written with Joshua L. Steiner” hitting shelves next week, and a generous (and revelatory) chunk of it was excerpted in the Wall St. Journal on Thursday (via Variety). The excerpt, published on the WSJ website with the very intriguing headline “I Wanted to Fit In With Hollywood’s Cool Kids. So I Made the Biggest Mistake of My Career,” details the thinking behind Lynton’s choice to greenlight “The Interview” and the absolutely bonkers fallout that followed.

More than a decade on, the details still astonish. The 2014 comedy, directed by Rogen and Evan Goldberg from a script by Dan Sterling, follows a pair of journalists (Rogen and Franco) who book an interview with (very real!) North Korean leader Kim Jong Un (played by Randall Park) and are soon recruited by the CIA to assassinate him during their visit. So far, so good.

But once the North Korean government caught wind of the picture, they threatened action against the United States if Sony released the film. Sony responded by delaying the film’s theatrical release from October 10 to December 25, and reportedly re-edited the film to make it more palatable to North Korea. No dice.

In November of that year, Sony’s computer systems were hacked by the so-called “Guardians of Peace” (a cybercrime group allegedly connected to the North Korean government). The now-infamous Sony Hack exposed scads of embarrassing internal communications, from producer Scott Rudin referring to Angelina Jolie as “a minimally talented spoiled brat” to emails in which then-Sony co-chairperson Amy Pascal and Rudin wrote about President Barack Obama in racist terms (Pascal ultimately resigned).

The group also threatened terrorist attacks on theaters showing the film, which led to major theater chains opting not to screen the film. Sony released it for online digital rental and purchase on December 24, 2014, followed by a limited theatrical release at selected theaters the following day. The film made $40 million in digital rentals, plus an additional $12.3 million worldwide in box office ticket sales, but the true cost of it was incalculable.

In 2024, Rogen also reflected on the fallout. “At the time, it was really bad and really catastrophic,” Rogen recalled while appearing on the Hawk vs. Wolf podcast. “People we knew were getting fired from it. The head of the studio [Sony Pictures head Amy Pascal] was essentially fired from it. It really caused seismic shifts in Hollywood at the time and I think how business was done in some ways.”

In his book, Lynton writes, “I considered myself a coolheaded executive until I made a choice that severely damaged my company and colleagues — all because I wanted to fit into Hollywood’s creative community — unleashing one of the worst cyberattacks in corporate history. It exposed the confidential emails of insiders and put my own family at risk.”

Seth Rogen and Evan GoldbergDavid Buchan/Variety

Lynton’s excerpt then takes readers through the basic outline of the scandal, noting that “almost immediately the FBI opened an investigation, and evidence suggested that the North Korean government likely led this attack as retribution and to quash the release of a film called ‘The Interview.’ … Eight months later, after it became clear that the North Koreans had hacked Sony, and after the studio had lost its relationships with many of its most important stars — including Will Smith, Adam Sandler and Angelina Jolie — I spoke to President Obama about the whole incident. Unsurprisingly, he asked the right question: ‘What were you thinking when you made killing the leader of a hostile foreign nation a plot point? Of course that was a mistake.’ The mistake? My decision to greenlight a project on the fly.”

Lynton then writes about his background and what sounds a bit like a serious case of imposter syndrome once he reached the upper echelons of Hollywood, adding that he “once went to the home of Bryan Lourd, a powerful CAA agent, for his annual Oscar party. Daniel Craig, Leonardo DiCaprio and Sandra Bullock were all having a great time — drinking, laughing, singing. George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Matt Damon stood in a tight circle, talking. I had seen Clooney at the studio that week and went up to join the conversation. While polite, they made clear that I simply did not belong. I was at the top of the heap in the movie business and still felt that I was watching from a folding chair in [his small hometown]. Perhaps that’s what left me so vulnerable and explains why, when I found myself deciding on a Seth Rogen project, I made the biggest mistake of my career.”

For Lynton, the choice to greenlight the project was born of both his need to feel cool in the industry and beat back Universal Studios, which had an existing relationship with Rogen. Of the film’s first Sony table-read, he wrote, “Walking into the room, I immediately felt energized and simultaneously completely out of place. Although middle-aged, I had not lost the observational skills I’d learned in middle school: I could quickly identify the cool kids and the ones eager for their approval.”

The read was a hit, however, and Lynton adds, “When the reading was over, Amy jumped up and said, ‘Let’s make this!’ I threw out all of our normal, careful approval processes and found myself agreeing. We rushed into the decision giddy about the project, thrilled to have outflanked our competition at Universal Studios and, alas, oblivious to the potential ramifications.”

The excerpt goes on to cover the ensuing weeks and months of Lynton’s life as the scandal and hack unfolded, both professionally and personally, and details Lynton’s own emotional takeaways from the whole ordeal. “Now I have come to believe that the whole affair neither began with that ill-fated table read nor ended with my buried feelings. It ultimately came down to a basic human truth: our desire to belong leads us all to weigh heavily the opinions of others,” he wrote.

Hollywood? Probably not the best place for those feelings.