‘Omicron Variant' Movie: Did a 1963 Hollywood Disaster Flick Predict the Pandemic?

Social media has been abuzz this week about a supposed 1960s movie that (in the Internet's telling of it) predicted the (or a) pandemic

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No. In a word, no.

Though social media is rife with pictures of a poster for a purported 1963 movie called "The Omicron Variant," with the shocking tagline "The Day The Earth Turned Into A Cemetery," there was actually no such film.

Irish director Becky Cheatle took to Twitter this week to admit the poster was a hoax, one she made for fun because the COVID-19 variant sounded like a good name for a classic science-fiction movie.

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https://twitter.com/BeckyCheatle/status/1466098296565415956

Nonetheless, even though Cheatle admitted quite clearly that it was all a goof, the Internet's interest is undiminished.

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As of Thursday evening, according to Google Trends, three of the top 25 searches related to "omicron" in the United States over the last day were related to the supposed movie.

According to IMDb, there was in fact a 1963 picture called "Omicron," an Italian sci-fi piece -- but that was about alien bodysnatchers, not pandemics.

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