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The limited release is testing the water. If people beat the doors down at those few theaters, the rest of the theaters around the country will be begging for release to them, too.
This aint your normal movie release and you are thinking in 20th century terms just like the boneheaded movie executives are.
If Sony at all wanted to get any money out of this movie and at the same time "get back" at the hackers, then they would have released it world wide at the same time on line. This movie would never ever have been seen outside the US in the first place, because the actors are relatively unknowns (hardly block buster people) to most international audiences.
So with all the hype thanks to the hacks, Sony had a great opportunity to actually earn at least the cost back on this movie. Releasing it online, on Youtube or Google Play at a reasonable price at the same time it released it in the US, would have garnered revenues that it would never have gotten because people were curious about the movie. In a week that curiosity would be gone and people will not spend 4-5 Euros on renting the movie if it gets released.
Now the question is why Sony did not do this.. and I suspect it is because they dont want to prove once and for all, that an VOD world wide release is not only possible (any idiot can see it is) but that it might actually be more profitable than the traditional methods. Why? Because the traditional methods gives the studios more control and theoretically more money if it was not for this pesky illegal downloads situation and the studios dont want to piss off and kill of the cinema chains. Plus TV producing companies would go totally ape**** over such a release, because it would also prove that doing it with TV shows is possible.
So instead Sony and their kind will continue to complain about piracy, while being the root cause of piracy in the first place, because they dont provide the content in the manner people want.