Seth Rogen is looking back on the controversy surrounding  “The Interview”, the 2014 comedy that wound up playing a central role in the infamous Sony hack.

In the film, Rogen and James Franco play a pair of Americans recruited by the CIA to assassinate North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un (Randall Park), a premise that resulted in a pressure campaign from the North Korean government — including threats of terror attacks on theatres — that scuttled the film’s planned theatrical release at the last minute, with the film instead released online.

“At the time, it was really bad and really catastrophic,” Rogen told Tony Hawk and Jason Ellis during a recent appearance on their “Hawk vs Wolf” podcast.

READ MORE: Seth Rogen Doesn’t Think North Korea Was Behind The Sony Hack Caused By ‘The Interview’

“People we knew were getting fired from it,” Rogen recalled. “The head of the studio [Sony Pictures head Amy Pascal] was essentially fired from it.”

However, the film’s online release proved to be the proverbial canary in the coal mine heralding the evolution of the movie industry.

“It really caused seismic shifts in Hollywood at the time, and I think how business was done in some ways,” Rogen said. “It kind of showed the success a movie could have in some ways if it has a full theatrical campaign and then immediately go to streaming. It streamed on Google, and I think it’s still the biggest movie that’s ever streamed on Google, which is crazy. Students come up to me and say they’re teaching it in their university class. It was wild.”

 

According the Rogen, the experience enlightened him about the true nature of controversy.

“It re-calibrated what I think is controversial,” he explained. “After that, I was like, now I know what it’s like. Unless the president is giving news conferences about it, that’s controversy. If someone is getting mad about it on social media, that’s not controversy. Having, like, the U.N. have to make a statement about it, that’s a controversy.”

READ MORE: Seth Rogen Admits ‘The Interview’ Was ‘A Bummer… I Won’t Be Making Any ISIS Movies Any Time Soon’

Rogen is also thankful that his career emerged more or less unscathed after the experience.

“We were able to keep making movies,” Rogen said. “What’s crazy is now it’s on television; it’s on FX at 2 p.m. It was at one point the most controversial thing in the world, and now I’ll be flipping channels on a Sunday afternoon, and it’s just playing. I was worried maybe it would cause some longer-lasting fallout than it did.”