When the Sony hack fiasco erupted late last year, rival studios didn’t rally around Sony. And that was a mistake, Warner Bros. Entertainment CEO Kevin Tsujihara admitted at the Code/Media conference at The Ritz-Carlton, Laguna Niguel, Calif., on Wednesday.
Warner Bros. CEO on Sony Hack: ‘We ... Should Have Done More for Sony’ (Video)
It’s a little too late for that.
Asa Mathat
Jason Del Rey has been a business journalist for 15 years and has covered Amazon, Walmart, and the e-commerce industry for the last decade. He was a senior correspondent at Vox.
“We could have and should have done more for Michael and for Sony,” Tsujihara said, referring to Sony Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton.
A number of factors kept Tsujihara and Warner Bros. from showing public support at the time, the executive said, including the speed at which the scandal erupted, the involvement of lawyers and the fear that a show of support could be twisted to being perceived as a self-serving act.
Even so, as my Re/code colleague Dawn Chmielewski previously reported, Sony’s big studio competitors actually did the opposite of supporting the studio, and instead tried to push “The Interview” out of theaters, fearing that patrons would stay home altogether after hackers threatened theatergoers’ safety.
The Seth Rogen comedy, a scathing satire of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, was the reason that hackers acting on behalf of North Korea infiltrated Sony’s systems. Tsujihara denied that Sony’s competitors used the hack to its advantage when Peter Kafka asked him about it onstage.
Tsujihara did say that Warner Bros. is taking new internal precautions in the wake of the attack, but didn’t go into detail.
Here’s a clip from the conversation:
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
