In early June 2012 Variety’s film editor Josh Dickey and Variety.com’s Chris Krewson posted public, biting tweets about a Mike Fleming Deadline item that floated the possibility of Angelina Jolie directing the Fifty Shades of Grey adaptation. The trade war erupted in real-time on Twitter. Jolie never had the conversation Fleming reported. The movie got made anyway.
Then
Fleming’s Deadline item said he had “heard rumors about the possibility of Angelina Jolie having a conversation or two about directing it. This has been buzzing around for a couple of weeks. The studio says that no discussions have been had, but they note that if she was interested, that the studio would be also.” The Variety team’s objection was structural — the phrasing acknowledged the studio had denied any actual conversations, which raised the question of why the item was running at all.
Dickey and Krewson’s tweets registered the trade-press irritation. The framing in their objection was that Fleming was floating studio-source rumor as news in a way the trade had publicly complained about for months. The Deadline-vs-Variety rivalry, by mid-2012, had moved from front-page columns into the kind of real-time Twitter back-and-forth that the BlogDogger feature had been doing more formally.
The original FishbowlLA framing tied the moment to the broader trade-press dynamic: Mike Fleming’s reporting style relied on aggressive use of “hearing buzz” framing, the Variety team’s objection was that this style let unverified studio-source talk get aggregated as scoop-adjacent news, and the public Twitter exchange was the kind of inter-trade litigation that didn’t used to happen on the open web.
Now
Fifty Shades of Grey was eventually directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson — not Angelina Jolie — and released by Universal in February 2015. It grossed roughly $570 million worldwide against a $40 million budget and spawned the Fifty Shades Darker (2017) and Fifty Shades Freed (2018) sequels, both directed by James Foley. The franchise made over $1.3 billion globally. Whether Jolie ever actually had the studio conversation Fleming was reporting remains unverified; she has not directed a film in that genre and her directorial work has gone in different directions.
Mike Fleming Jr. is now Co-Editor-in-Chief of Deadline. Josh Dickey moved from Variety to TheWrap, Mashable, and Yahoo Entertainment. Chris Krewson left Variety later that same year (June 2012) to take the same web-editor role at THR — covered in a separate FishbowlLA item — and has subsequently been in senior editorial roles at multiple media organizations.
The 2012 dispute looks small in retrospect. Both Deadline and Variety are now PMC titles, in the same office. The “hearing buzz” reporting style Fleming used in the Fifty Shades item has been substantially normalized across all trades — it’s now how most scoop journalism is written, with subsequent reporting either confirming or quietly retiring the rumor. The version of the Variety/Deadline rivalry the tweets captured no longer exists at the corporate level, even if the individual reporters’ editorial preferences remain identifiable.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine: June 2012 snapshot