By Owen Reyes · Republished 2026-05-20 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, 2012
April 1 is a hazard for fast-moving trade reporters, and in 2012 FishbowlLA caught Deadline.com failing the test — then declining to admit it cleanly.
Then
The prank originated at worstpreviews.com, in a fake item claiming James Cameron wanted to direct a sequel to Ridley Scott’s Prometheus. The Guardian picked it up, then appended a correction acknowledging the story was an April Fools’ joke and apologizing for the misinformation.
Deadline’s Mike Fleming had sourced the errant Guardian report, but FishbowlLA reported that Deadline handled the unwind less gracefully. Rather than a clean retraction, the site was said to have removed user comments pointing out the hoax and posted an update attributing fresh, hedged quotes about a possible Prometheus sequel to unnamed ‘insiders.’
That did not sit well with Alex Ginzburg, the author of the original gag, who said flatly that Cameron had never said any of it and asked what, exactly, Deadline was now talking about. FishbowlLA noted that cinemablend.com had been fooled too, and could not resist imagining a better Cameron prank involving a creature hauled up from the Mariana Trench.
Now
The correction culture the item poked at has, if anything, hardened. The norm that a digital outlet should acknowledge an error plainly — rather than quietly editing a post and scrubbing the comments that flagged it — became a louder expectation as readers grew adept at archiving and screenshotting the original.
The underlying joke also aged strangely well. Prometheus did get a sequel, just not from Cameron: Ridley Scott returned to direct 2017’s Alien: Covenant, and the broader Alien franchise carried on, most recently with 2024’s Alien: Romulus. A fake story about a Prometheus follow-up turned out to be half right about the franchise, if wrong about the director.
Cameron, for his part, spent the decade on Avatar, releasing The Way of Water in 2022 and continuing the sequels. The 2012 post stands as a tidy little case study in how a single unverified aggregation can ripple across the trades — and how the cleanup is often messier than the mistake.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.