Sony Placed A Bizarre Ban On Jonah Hill For Superbad

Corporations are not big fans of risk, and they’re even less enamored of controversy. In sane times, they would prefer for their brands to be associated with fun, consumption, and more consumption. They want you to feel ecstatic about buying their product, and they don’t want you running off to the competition to sample similar goods. Most importantly, though, they don’t want to piss off their shareholders. So when their product is associated with something that bucks the system or is simply unsavory, they get their hackles up.

Once upon a time, movie studios didn’t have to worry what corporations thought about their movies. Then corporations like Gulf + Western, Coca-Cola, and Sony, drawn by the glamor of the dream factory, bought into the movie business. They wanted their prestige of owning a Hollywood studio. Some of them were also keen on having their products showcased in motion pictures, a medium that attracted millions of consumers to multiplexes every weekend to see the hot new releases starring the biggest stars in the world. The dream was to have their goods bolstered, if not endorsed by the likes of Eddie MurphyBarbra Streisand and Harrison Ford, each of them casually knocking back a Coke or switching on a Sony television.

Sony’s ownership of Columbia Pictures is a fascinating showbiz story, one that inspired the must-read showbiz book “Hit & Run: How Jon Peters and Peter Guber Took Sony for a Ride in Hollywood.” The short version of the story is that the company didn’t understand how the film industry worked, and got steamrolled by a couple of veteran operators, one of whom, Jon Peters, was/is a complete maniac. Unlike Coke, Sony stayed in the game, but going forward they were going to be more mindful of how the studio reflected on their brand. So when Columbia greenlit the teen sex comedy “Superbad,” they made one of their most coveted products off-limits.

18 years after its release, “Superbad” is considered a raunchy classic of the form, but when parent company Sony decided to check in on the film prior to release, they freaked out when they saw Jonah Hill’s character, Seth, playing a Sony PlayStation.

During a red carpet appearance at South by Southwest to promote his streaming series “The Studio,” Seth Rogen, who co-wrote “Superbad” with Evan Goldberg, revealed that Sony put their foot down. “We were told that (Seth) was so reprehensible to the studio that they were like, there’s a scene where they’re playing video games and (Sony) was like ‘Jonah can’t touch a PlayStation.'” While Seth is certainly the more sexually frank of the two main characters, it’s still strange that they would single him out. Kids all over the world identified with him, and he winds up being a good guy by the end of the movie. Sony wasn’t having it. According to Rogen, “They were like ‘We can’t have him interact with our products because it’s too vile a character,’ and I was like, ‘It’s based on me, that’s very insulting’, but we accommodated them, ultimately.”

Nevertheless, “Superbad” wound up grossing an impressive $171 million on a $20 million budget, and the PlayStation is still, to the best of my knowledge, unsullied in its depiction in Sony movies.