An image has been viral on social media recently, which purportedly shows the poster of a 1963 film named "The Omicron Variant". Social media users have been sharing this poster widely, to insinuate that the film-makers had predicted the appearance of the Omicron variant of COVID-19, which was recently discovered by scientists in South Africa.
Like its predecessor Delta, Omicron was named after letters of the Greek alphabet by the World Health Organization.
BOOM found these posts to be highly misleading; while there does exist an Italian film from 1963 called 'Omicron', the title "The Omicron Variant" does not exist. Furthermore, we found that the poster used in the image was that of the 1974 film 'Phase IV' (also titled 'Sucesos en la cuarta fase' in Spanish)
The image was among a series of photoshopped posters created by a Twitter user, who had edit the title "The Omicron Variant" into some posters of science-fiction films from the 1970s.
We found the poster - showing a man and a woman stare at a bright source of light - being shared on Twitter by multiple users. A tagline on top of the poster read "The Day The Earth Was Turned Into A Cemetery".
Filmmaker Ram Gopal Varma also shared the poster with the caption, "Believe it or faint ..This film came In 1963 ..Check the tagline."
Click here to view an archive of the above tweet.
We also found users sharing the poster of Facebook with the same claim.
Fact Check
BOOM searched for the film "The Omicron Variant" with the keyword "1963" on Google. While we could not find any film with the title "The Omicron Variant", we did find an Italian science-fiction film named "Omicron" that was released that year.
According to the plot description provided by IMDB, the film is about "a dead factory worker who comes back to life after his body becomes inhabited by an invisible alien".
We also did a reverse image search of the poster itself. It led us to a poster of another film titled 'Phase IV' directed by Saul Bass. In this poster, we also found the tagline "The Day The Earth Turned Into A Cemetery", written in Italian.
Looking further through the keyword search results on Twitter, we also came across a user who had shared the photo on November 28, along with some other posters, stating, "I Photoshopped the phrase "The Omicron Variant" into a bunch of 70s sci-fi movie posters."