“Why did everyone have Che wrong?” reads the headline at Variety’s festival blog The Circuit. “The headline all over last week’s Cannes prognostications were about how Soderbergh’s Che epic wasn’t going to make the Croisette,” Mike Jones writes. “Today, all the Cannes headlines lead with Soderbergh. Surprise, surprise: Che will storm the south of France - all 4 hours of it.”

Jones says that after sales agency The Wild Bunch failed to find a distributor for the film in Berlin, “the Cannes rumors started, becoming a near-fact in the blogosphere that there would be no revolution on the Croisette.” The implication is that Wild Bunch spread rumors that the movie wouldn’t make it to Cannes, in order to make it instant news when it did.

But the thing is, I just did a pretty exhaustive Google BlogSearch, and though I found several post-Berlin posts indicating that Che would make its debut in the south of France, I couldn’t find a single blog post trying to pass off Che’s absence from Cannes as fact dated before this Variety story from April 17. In that story, Todd McCarthy said neither of Soderbergh’s two films would premiere in Cannes, because “Soderbergh has essentially finished the second film but, despite non-stop work in recent weeks, hasn’t quite gotten the first half of the Benicio Del Toro starrer where he wants it.” The Variety report was widely circulated throughout the blogosphere over the following few days. That report came almost two weeks after a rumor, posted by Jeff Wells on April 4, that although odds weren’t great that Soderbergh would be able to make the deadline, he was determined to get Che to Cannes:

One guy says he’s been told by a Warner Bros. source that Soderbergh is determined to get the film[s] done in time for Cannes. Another guy told me he’s heard the chances of The Argentine being “ready-ready” are “less than 50%.” And yet Soderbergh, he adds, repeating what the Warner Bros. guy passed along, is said to be confident he can have The Argentine in some kind of decent shape by the mid-April deadline, or roughly ten days from now.

Wells’ post is the only thing on the English language internet that I could find pre-dating the Variety story that even suggests that Che might not play at Cannes, and I ultimately walked away from that post thinking that chances of the film making the line-up were pretty good. And blogs were still suggesting that Che would make the lineup in the days between Wells’ report and McCarthy’s.

Maybe I’m wrong, maybe there’s a blog post I missed. But if you really want to know how it became “a near-fact in the blogosphere that there would be no revolution on the Croisette”? It looks like it’s because Variety said so.