Sure. But hence my point about opening weekend (trial) vs. what happens after opening weekend (ongoing business, lifetime earnings). You can drive trial of a bad product, but it's extremely hard to get people to keep coming back, or to tell others it's worth seeing. So your bad product + ultra-hype is basically a recipe for a big opening with extreme decay every day thereafter. This usually isn't enough to recoup the production, print & advertising costs of a major movie, especially when you factor in profit-sharing and other cuts to top-line revenue (Rogen and Goldberg are almost assuredly getting points on the movie's gross, and it's possible that Franco is, too.)
A general rule of thumb is that a movie studio spends at least as much on prints and advertising ("P&A") as it does on production costs for the movie itself. That is to say, if the movie cost $35M to make, Sony sunk another $35M or more into P&A. So it would need to earn more than $70M to break even (more than that, because everyone's taking points off the top-line gross, plus profit-sharing with theaters and distributors, etc.). Is it possible that Sony could earn that much on this sort of movie, given its notoriety? Maybe, maybe not. Notoriety alone can rarely get you to $70M. (It's possible, but unlikely.) To stand a better chance, your movie also needs to be halfway decent.
Once again, I have no idea if this movie is good or bad. Just saying this for the sake of explanation.
Surely if the movie is bad this (http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-30589472) is still an incredibly good launch by world class pr people. If the movie is good then it's still a good launch and will make money afterwards. The thing about bad movies is you can only make money on the opening weekend - this marketing was free (+the original marketing costs already spent and ignoring the lasting costs of being hacked) so the ROI will be incredibly good. Any film that caused the president to give a speech about it pre-release is going to do well on the opening weekend - I still don't think it matters if it turns out its a bad film or not, but I can't wait for the data. I guess it will be here? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Interview_(2014_film) And total costs around <$100m (again discounting hack).
This also isn't taking into account the ROI from turning Sony into the victim in this scenario - not a massive company with a tiny, unsophisticated infosec team who messed up big time by not investing more in security.
A general rule of thumb is that a movie studio spends at least as much on prints and advertising ("P&A") as it does on production costs for the movie itself. That is to say, if the movie cost $35M to make, Sony sunk another $35M or more into P&A. So it would need to earn more than $70M to break even (more than that, because everyone's taking points off the top-line gross, plus profit-sharing with theaters and distributors, etc.). Is it possible that Sony could earn that much on this sort of movie, given its notoriety? Maybe, maybe not. Notoriety alone can rarely get you to $70M. (It's possible, but unlikely.) To stand a better chance, your movie also needs to be halfway decent.
Once again, I have no idea if this movie is good or bad. Just saying this for the sake of explanation.