Happy April Fool's Day! It's the one day of the year that can be especially annoying if you're actually trying to get anything productive done, given the wealth of misinformation that is fielded out in just about every corner of the web, from Facebook to Twitter and even news websites. I've already fallen for a few pranks today, and here at What Culture, we're going to run down 10 of the most ridiculous pieces of film news announced on April Fool's Day. What these "news" pieces did was to blur the line; these stories were believed by a large amount of those who read them (in many cases, myself included), only for the "victims" to naturally feel pretty stupid in retrospect. Whether it's unsavoury flavours of the moment getting coveted roles, ridiculous movie merchandise or things we can only
wish were true, here are 10 ridiculous film stories everyone believed (but were actually April Fool's).
10. Monolith Action Figure
Geeky merchandise outlet ThinkGeek has a reputation for coming up with some pretty hilarious (and imaginative) April Fool's Day pranks, normally in the form of products that don't actually exist (though we wish they did). They really upped their game a few years ago by mocking up an action figure based on the Monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Yes, the iconic slab of black matter, the alien technology that ended up furthering human evolution, was touted as having "zero points of articulation", and being the must-have gift for any fans of Kubrick's classic movie. In the end the prank had such a rapturous response that ThinkGeek actually decided to make the product for real. Here's a case of an April Fool's prank being so sucessful that it actually transpired into reality. Fantastic.