During an interview on on the 'Happy Sad Confused' podcast, the 'Ocean's Eleven' director reveals he has reteamed with the 2011 thriller film's screenwriter Scott Z. Burns to develop its follow-up.
- December 30, 2020
AceShowbiz - Filmmaker Steven Soderbergh is working to fast-track a "philosophical sequel" to "Contagion" in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The "Ocean's Eleven" director reveals he's reteamed with the 2011 thriller's screenwriter Scott Z. Burns to develop the follow-up.
"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 explained on the "Happy Sad Confused" podcast.
"You'll kind of look at the two of them as kind of paired but very different hair colours. So, Scott and I had been talking about, 'So, what's the next iteration of a 'Contagion'-type story?' We have been working on that. We should probably hotfoot it a little bit."
The news emerges months after "Contagion", which starred Gwyneth Paltrow as a woman who brings home a mystery viral illness during a business trip to Asia, soared in popularity on streaming services as people tried to make sense of the coronavirus crisis.
At the time, Burns insisted he wasn't surprised by the pandemic, because during his research for the movie, he learned such a global outbreak was inevitable.
"The scientists I spoke to, and there were a lot of them, all said that this was a matter of when, not if," he told Slate in March. "So, I guess my feeling as someone who believes in science is that when scientists tell us those things, we would do well to listen."
