Dec 22, 2014 3 min read

President Obama and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney didn’t agree on a whole lot during the 2012 presidential campaign, but two years later, after the dust of that fight has settled, they find themselves in accord on at least one point.

The movie “The Interview” should be released.

The purportedly lowbrow satirical comedy about a couple of TV stars being recruited by the CIA to bump off North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is probably not anything that would match the tastes of either Obama or Romney – one imagines recent or upcoming releases like “Foxcatcher” or “The Imitation Game” to be more what they would like to sample with their popcorn – but both joined the growing chorus of lawmakers and commentators late last week who were excoriating Sony Pictures for capitulating to threats of violence by canceling the Christmas Day release of “The Interview” and even suggesting initially the movie would have no afterlife on DVD or through on-demand video services. Sony has since backed off on that, but, at least as of this writing, the fate of the $44 million movie is in limbo.

Sony, and the companies that control thousands of screens across the country, should not have folded so readily in the face of the threats, especially since the Department of Homeland Security found there were no credible plots afoot. If the threats were coming from North Korea, it sets a dangerous precedent – dictators can dictate what we can see on our movie screens.

“If somebody is able to intimidate folks out of releasing a satirical movie, imagine what they start doing if they see a documentary they don’t like,” Obama said in a Friday news conference. “Or even worse, imagine if producers or distributors start engaging in self-censorship because they don’t want to offend the sensibilities of someone whose sensibilities probably need to be offended.”

“The Interview” is not the first movie, made in Hollywood, or anywhere else, that has raised the hackles of a despot. Before the United States entered World War II, for instance, Charlie Chaplin created “The Great Dictator,” in which he portrays a fanatical, fulminating, dictator named Adenoid Hynkel who leads a European nation called Tomainia and dreams of world domination. Any resemblance to Adolph Hitler was strictly intentional, and, indeed, the point of the enterprise. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who was notoriously weak-kneed when it came to the Nazis, initially banned it from his own country, but he was booted from office by the time of its release, and it was a hit in the UK and was the second most popular movie in the United States in 1941.

Even if Sony would opt to keep “The Interview” under wraps in perpetuity, enough prints of it have circulated that it will almost certainly have a vigorous life on illegal download sites. In fact, many people will probably be more inclined to see the movie since it’s become drenched in controversy and a free-speech cause celebre, rather than just another chunk of screen-filler at the cineplex or another distraction cluttering the pay-cable landscape.

Kim Jong Un’s late father, Kim Jong il, was known to be a film enthusiast, with his tastes tending toward James Bond and Daffy Duck. Kim Jong-il even had an actor and director from South Korea kidnapped so they could make movies to his specifications. But, no matter how knowledgeable the Kim family may be when it comes to Hollywood, we shouldn’t allow Kim Jong Un to have any say-so on what we see at the moviehouse, on Christmas Day or any other day.