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Sony wanted to market The Interview by playing up Kim Jong-Un’s “charming” side

Kim Jong-Un, in 2012.
Kim Jong-Un, in 2012.
Ed Jones / AFP / Getty
Andrew Prokop is a senior politics correspondent at Vox, covering the White House, elections, and political scandals and investigations. He’s worked at Vox since the site’s launch in 2014, and before that, he worked as a research assistant at the New Yorker’s Washington, DC, bureau.

Documents posted from the Sony hack have revealed the company's extensive hand-wringing about The Interview, an upcoming Seth Rogen comedy depicting the bloody assassination of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un. Amid apparent concerns about how North Korea would react, Sony's Japanese chief executive Kazuo Hirai intervened to tone down the depiction of Kim's death, the New York Times reports.

Now, at Defamer, Sam Biddle posts a new set of hacked documents, including this excerpt from a marketing PDF from October with another suggestion for how to sell the movie — that Kim should be portrayed as a more "charming," "complex," and "interesting" character.

Sony Kim Jong Un

An advance review of The Interview by Rudie Obias of MoviePilot does in fact conclude that when Kim is introduced in the film, "his presence is not menacing, but rather charming and adorable."

Kim Jong-Un is, of course, a ruthless dictator, and his regime runs a series of gulags for political prisoners abusing human rights "without any parallel in the contemporary world," according to a United Nations report. Read more about the Sony hack here, and more about North Korea's gulags here.