Steve Carell North Korea Film Canceled

By Nick Roman ·

North Korea basically has Hollywood over a barrel, at the moment. Its hack attack on Sony resulted in the cancellation of The Interview, as the movie is now being put on the shelf with no apparent release planned in the future. And now, the controversy is affecting even non-Sony projects.

Inside sources have confirmed that an untitled "paranoid thriller" set in North Korea has been canned. The film, to have starred Steve Carell and to have been directed by Pirates of the Caribbean helmer Gore Verbinski, is being shelved since Regency Films feels that "under the current circumstances, it just makes no sense to move forward." Fox declined to distribute the movie anyhow, necessitating its cancellation. There had been discussions of changing the location of the film's setting, but it was ultimately decided to just scrap the movie altogether. It's no big loss for Regency anyhow, since the company already has a multi-year, multi-picture deal with Verbinski that they can now focus on.

However, Carell still took to Twitter to express his disappointment at how Hollywood is kowtowing to threats from terrorists:

Carell is spot-on, since these movies getting pulled represent a fairly big blow to freedom of artistic expression. This all comes less than 24 hours after U.S. officials confirmed a link between the Sony hacks and North Korea, which essentially confirmed what everyone suspected once The Interview, a comedy in which James Franco and Seth Rogen are recruited to assassinate Kim Jong-un, became the subject of the hackers' threats. While one could see how North Korea would be offended by all this, I stand by something South Park's Trey Parker once noted about the subjective nature of comedy: "It either all has to be okay or none of it's okay." This whole situation is a slippery slope. If North Korea is off-limits in film, then why isn't Canada? Mexico? Why should we be able to joke about Australia? Japan? Africa? I think it's clear these were pretty empty threats from the hackers, since North Korea isn't going to risk open war with the U.S. over a movie. But now that they've acquiesced to threats, there's no stopping another group from pulling the same B.S. in the future, resulting in artistic integrity being compromised across the board.

While I'm not sure the world is exactly mourning the loss of this Steve Carell movie, it's more a matter of principle than anything else. This is an absolute mess of a situation that has the potential to get worse before it gets better. Here's hoping Hollywood takes a stand and doesn't give in to these sorts of threats in the future.

Via: Deadline

Credit: NBC

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