Well, gang, things just got a whole lot worse.
Theaters were going to substitute showings of the 2004 film "Team America" for "The Interview," with at least one theater in Texas confirming a show date. But now that's been canceled too. Paramount Pictures, who owns the movie rights, has pulled it from all theaters.
Here is a
link to the Washington Post story about this. Notice that the story announcing screenings of "Team America" is at the bottom, but at the top it says "Update" and explains about the cancellation.
I've lived a long time and seen some awful stuff happen to America, but I think this is a symbolic representation of how American ideals are pretty much finished.
You can thump your chest, drive your bad-boy pickup, and chant "USA USA!" all you want. But you now live in a country that's running scared and cannot even show its own films.
Freedom of speech only works if you have the might to enforce that. Looks like we don't anymore.
Maybe this will make people step back and think about the path we're on. We've become a nation of coddled, sensitive wimps who need "trigger warnings" and can't win a war because we made our military a social experiment.
Now we pay the price and have not one, but two precedents set where we're too scared of outside threats to show films. What next? They demand we dump Nicki Minaj and play K-Pop instead? Hey, that might be an improvement (kidding).