Seth Rogen has claimed that Sony once banned Jonah Hill from touching a PlayStation on-screen.
Speaking on the red carpet at South By South West, the Pineapple Express actor was asked what the most ridiculous note he ever received from a studio was. A note is typically a minor demand made by a production company during the production of a film.
“On Superbad, we were told that Jonah Hill’s character, 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‘.”
Sony Pictures co-financed the film, which also starred Michael Cera, Christropher Mintz-Plasse, and Emma Stone.
“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.”
The scene in question sees Michael Cera’s character, Seth, play The Getaway: Black Monday on the PlayStation 2.
Superbad writer Seth Rogen is a huge fan of video games and has been involved in several video game-adjacent projects over the years. Most recently, he provided the voice of Donkey Kong in Universal’s Super Mario Bros. Movie.
Rogen and Superbad writing partner Evan Goldberg acquired the rights to Blake J. Harris’ book Console Wars in the late 2010s, initially planning to adapt the story of Sega vs Nintendo into a drama series.
However, the series was later transtioned into a documentary which aired in 2020.
