Released in 2011, Steven Soderbergh‘s thriller Contagion gained new relevance here in 2020 thanks to the eerie similarities to the real-life COVID-19 pandemic, shooting the movie to the top of VOD rental charts and spawning all kinds of tweets and think-piece articles. Now would be the time to make a sequel, it seems, and some sort of follow-up is indeed in the works.
Soderbergh spilled the beans in a chat with the Happy Sad Confused podcast.
“I’ve got a project in development that Scott Burns is working with me on, that’s a kind of philosophical sequel to Contagion, but in a different context,” Soderbergh told the podcast.
He added, “You’ll look at the two of them as kind of paired, but they have very different hair colors. So, Scott and I were talking about, ‘So, what’s the next iteration of a Contagion-type story?’ So we have been working on that. We should probably hot-foot it a little bit.”
Scott Z. Burns wrote Contagion, which starred Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Winslet, and Jude Law. In the film, “Healthcare professionals, government officials and everyday people find themselves in the midst of a pandemic as the CDC works to find a cure.”
Thanks to Indiewire for bringing this one to our attention.