By Owen Reyes · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, April 2012
In early April 2012, FishbowlLA documented a small trade-press embarrassment: a WorstPreviews.com April Fools item — a fake story claiming James Cameron wanted to direct a sequel to Ridley Scott’s Prometheus — had been picked up as real. The original FishbowlLA framing pointed out that Deadline.com had “failed the April Fools test.”
Then
The WorstPreviews April Fools item was a piece of plausible-sounding film-development fiction. Prometheus was a major 2012 release — Ridley Scott’s return to the Alien universe — which made any Cameron-sequel-interest story structurally newsworthy.
The episode documented the recurring April Fools hazard for fast-cadence aggregation-and-scoop journalism. Richard Horgan’s FishbowlLA framing was characteristically wry.
Now
Prometheus opened in June 2012; Ridley Scott continued the universe with Alien: Covenant (2017) and the franchise has continued through the 2024 Alien: Romulus and the 2025 FX series Alien: Earth. James Cameron never directed a Prometheus sequel.
The structural problem the 2012 episode illustrated — that speed-optimized journalism is systematically vulnerable to plausible fabrications — has if anything intensified in the social-media era.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.