Sony Hosted Obama Fundraiser — Now Releasing Bin Laden Movie Before Election

What was the controversy?

There may have been an overtly political reason that moviegoers would see the story of the Osama bin Laden raid just before voting for president. Sony Pictures, the studio distributing Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal's film about the raid, had hosted a fundraiser for Barack Obama on its Culver City studio lot in April 2011 — reportedly the only major studio to hold a political fundraiser that cycle. Sony then set the film's release for October 12, 2012, less than a month before the presidential election.

Who objected?

The timing drew fire from multiple directions. In an August 2011 New York Times op-ed, columnist Maureen Dowd charged that the filmmakers were getting "top-level access to the most classified mission in history" and that the film was "perfectly timed to give a home-stretch boost to a campaign that has grown tougher." Representative Peter King (R-New York), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, demanded an investigation into the administration's cooperation with the filmmakers. The White House dismissed the accusations as "ridiculous," and Bigelow and Boal denied the film was political.

How did it end?

Sony ultimately blinked. The studio pushed the film's release past the election — it finally arrived in December 2012 as Zero Dark Thirty, earning five Academy Award nominations and grossing over $130 million worldwide. The October release date that had raised so many eyebrows never happened.

The episode remains a case study in how Hollywood and Washington mix: a studio courts a president, a president's reelection benefits from a heroic narrative, and a filmmaker's artistic project becomes a political football long before anyone sees a frame of it.