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'The Interview' Now Has a Perfect 10 Rating on IMDb

Thanks to 4chan.
​Image: Sony Pictures Entertainment

The Interview, the North Korean-themed comedy that may have inspired hackers to steal and leak terabytes of data from Sony Pictures Entertainment, now has a ​perfect 10 rating from more than 21,000 fans on the Internet Movie Database as of the time of this writing, a higher score than Orson Welles' Citizen K​ane.

The high rating is extra impressive considering the fact that nobody, except for a few critics who gave it middli​ng reviews, has seen the film. Sony canceled its scheduled December 25th release after hackers threatened to release more stolen data and implied there would be 9/11-style violence against theaters that showed it.

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The outpouring of public support came straight from the dank internet dungeon of 4chan's TV discussion message board, on which an anonymous user posted a thread on December 19th encouraging people to rate the movie a 10 so that North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un can get "FUCKED BY THE LONG DICK OF FREEDOM," as the original post suggests.

The first IMDb reviews for The Interview coincide with the thread's posting, and a subsequent thread in the 4chan subreddit on Reddit credits a "raid"—a beautiful and terrifying internet phenomenon in which users of a particular site invade another—for the film's high rating.

In short, a bunch of 4chan users trolled The Interview's IMDb page for freedom.

As IMDb user jmcd88 put it in their review, "Despite only watching the trailers, I am giving this film a 10/10 out of pure protest. It's such a shame to know that freedom of speech can be censored based off actions from another country."

That North Korea has denied any involvement in the hacks and the evidence that supposedly indicates their involvement has been called into q​uestion doesn't seem to matter to IMDb's cinematic freedom fighters. Most of the reviews have titles like "Sony's bad move," "If North Korea hate [sic] it…," and, more simply, "America."

Screenshot: IMDb.

The most popular movie o​n IMDb is currently The Shawshank Redemption, another controversial ranking bolstered by proactive upvoting and downvoting from a dedicated foll​owing. That's followed closely by The Godfather. Both hold scores of 9.2 and have vote counts in the millions. If the outpouring of support for The Interview continues apace, it could very well become the most popular movie of all time on the site, an admirable achievement for a film virtually nobody has seen.

Of course, this all depends on the movie not being a complete turd, a wager which is really anybody's game right now.

At the very least, The Interview's newfound IMDb popularity bodes well for an eventual release of the movie, which some speculate will be on Sony's own ad-run streaming site, Crackle, which has been slowly building its online presence through exclusive licensing deals. Can you say, "false flag?" Actually, don't. Please. This horrorshow of a public spectacle is insane enough already.