Summary
- Seth Rogan shares the funniest note he’s received from a studio while making a film.
- It came while making Superbad, with Sony telling Rogan that Jonah Hill was not allowed to go near a PlayStation controller.
- This was because the studio found his character too vile, and didn’t want the PlayStation brand to be associated with him.
If you can believe it, Superbad is turning 18 this year. That is, frankly, absolutely terrifying. Hitting theatres in 2007, the film was distributed by Sony Pictures. This was well into the lifecycle of another Sony product, the PlayStation 2, and a year after its successor, the PlayStation 3, had hit stores.
So, it’s no surprise that when a video game is shown in the movie, it’s clearly being played through a PlayStation. Or, at least, the actor is pretending to play with what appears to be a PS2 controller. However, there was one stipulation to having a PlayStation appear in Superbad: it couldn’t be anywhere near Jonah Hill.
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This comes from Seth Rogan, who spoke with Rotten Tomatoes at the SXSW film festival. Here, he touched on his fan-favourite comedy, sharing the funniest note he’s ever received during a film’s production.
“Jonah Can’t Touch A PlayStation”, Sony Told Seth Rogan
“Jonah Hill’s character, Seth, was so reprehensible to the studio,” says Rogan. “There’s a scene where they’re playing video games, and they’re like, ‘Jonah can’t touch a PlayStation […] We can’t have him interact with our products as a character, because it’s too vile a character.'”
Of course, optics and brand perception are everything to a studio like Sony, so it’s not hard to imagine that they want to project the right idea of what a PlayStation fan acts like. Turns out, not like Seth from Superbad. Good to know.
With that said, back in 2007, Sony would have had much bigger fish to fry when it came to the PlayStation’s image. The PS2 had been an astronomical success, easily outperforming every other console in the generation combined, according to the latest figures. However, the PS3 was a disaster, immediately panned for its high retail price. Perhaps letting Jonah Hill hold the controller for a bit wouldn’t have been so bad after all.