'The Interview' Kills It with Over $15M in Online Sales

By any measure the Christmas holiday was a busy one for Hollywood with about half a dozen movies opening in theaters. And it turns out to have been quite a lucrative one, too, with The Hobbit, Into the Woods and Unbroken all doing extremely well.  But it turns out audiences who stayed home weren't watching your typical holiday fare; they were instead watching James Franco and Seth Rogen kill Kim Jong-un in The Interview. 

While the controversial Sony comedy only earned $1.8M theatrically over the weekend, the film earned more than $15M through digital On Demand services. That's the biggest digital release in Sony's history, and the total is only going to go up once numbers from Apple's ITunes sales are made public. Combined, that comes close to the $20M analysts were projecting if the film had opened in a traditional release before the hacking scandal broke out.  Keep in mind it only hit 331 smaller art house theater chains, and if Sony decides to release it to major exhibitors we could see the total rise even higher.

So what does all this mean? That's hard to figure at this stage. Certainly this is a win for Sony, which is why they released these numbers when VOD earnings are typically kept under wraps. But is this some kind of signpost for the future? Probably not. While some may lament this as the end of traditional theatrical release schedules, The Interview had the kind of publicity that 99.9% of straight-to-VOD movies simply will never get.