North Korean officials called an action comedy film starring Seth Rogen and James Franco in a plot to kill North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un an "act of war" and said they will take a
"merciless counter-measure" if the movie is released, BBC News reports.
"The Interview," scheduled for release in October by Columbia Pictures, is about a talk-show host and producer who land an interview with Kim Jong Un and then are recruited by the CIA to assassinate the dictator.
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"Making and releasing a movie on a plot to hurt our top-level leadership is the most blatant act of terrorism and war and will absolutely not be tolerated," a spokesman for the North Korean Foreign Ministry said, according to the state-run Korean Central News Agency. "If the U.S. administration allows and defends the showing of the film, a merciless counter-measure will be taken."
The threat of action seems to be an escalation from Monday, when the
North Korean regime just said the Rogen film showed American "desperation."
The script originally was about meeting Kim Jong Il, but was changed when the dictator died in 2011 and
Kim Jong Un assumed power, Yahoo Movies said.
Rogen told Yahoo Movies that the leadership change "actually worked much better, because he's closer to our age, and it made it easier to forge a relationship between his character and our characters."
The premise for the movie sprang from “hypothetical discussion about how journalists have access to the world’s most dangerous people, and they hypothetically would be in a good situation to assassinate them," Rogen said, according to Yahoo Movies.
According to the BBC, the North Korean spokesman said the "reckless U.S. provocative insanity" of mobilizing a "gangster filmmaker" to challenge the North's leadership was triggering "a gust of hatred and rage" among North Korean people and soldiers.
Twitter users offered mixed reactions to the threat.
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