Hours after the news broke that Sony Pictures will not release Seth Rogan's North Korea-based comedy The Interview, the scene at the heart of the controversy has appeared on YouTube.

The video seems to be genuine, it is as described in the leaked emails exchanged which said that the sequence involves a helicopter, is in slow motion, and features Katy Perry’s 2010 hit “Firework”.

Top executives in Japan feared that the film went too far, and put pressure on Sony Pictures' co-chairwoman Amy Pascal to alter the ending.

She emailed Seth Rogen, the film's lead actor and director, asking him to make changes to the film.

She received this response from Rogen: “We will make it less gory. There are currently four burn marks on his face. We will take out three of them, leaving only one. We reduce the flaming hair by 50 percent … The head explosion can’t be more obscured than it is because we honestly feel that if it’s any more obscured you won’t be able to tell its exploding and the joke won’t work. Do you think this will help? Is it enough?”

The video contains a Columbia Pictures watermark - Sony Pictures is its parent company.

It was origionally posted by a YouTube user called TrenderManHD - and the time that this article was published the clip was going towards 700,000 views.

The account has no information about the owner, and only has four previous video uploads.