Given how thoroughly f*cked off everyone is at the pandemic, and how it really doesn't seem to be coming to an end as we'd hoped, the idea of it beginning to influence movies is particularly galling.
'Songbird', for example, was the first movie about the pandemic and saw a mutant strain of the coronavirus accelerate lockdown measures. Guess what's happening now, then? That's right, folks, there's a variant strain of coronavirus that's way more transmissible doing the rounds! Hooray! (Please note that this is highly sarcastic.)
If that wasn't enough, director Steven Soderbergh revealed recently in an interview with the Happy Sad Confused podcast that he's already cooking up 'Contagion 2: The Virus Takes Manhattan'. Sort of. Here's what he had to say for himself.
"I’ve got a project in development that Scott Burns (the co-writer of 'Contagion') is working with me on, that’s a kind of philosophical sequel to 'Contagion' but in a different context," Soderbergh explained.
"You’ll kind of look at the two of them as kind of paired but very different hair colors. 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."
Obviously, seeing as how he wrote a movie about a pandemic and now there is one, you've got to imagine Soderbergh is seeing things happen that he didn't necessarily foresee. Not only that, but there was also the utterly haphazard government response that didn't necessarily factor into 'Contagion' either, not to mention the political fallout too.
No doubt it'll make for a very interesting movie that we can all look back on twenty-odd years from now, if cinemas are still a thing and the world hasn't descended into 'Mad Max'-style dystopia.
