Steven Soderbergh is considering a sequel to his 2011 pandemic thriller Contagion, and he has some “terrifying ideas.” The Matt Damon and Gwyneth Paltrow starrer about a highly contagious terminal sickness that sparks a societal collapse eerily predicted a lot of the events of the initial U.S. COVID-19 outbreak in 2020, and the film enjoyed a huge amount of renewed interest at the time. Five years later, Soderbergh said, he’s been mulling a follow-up. “There would have to be, I think, a plot that doesn’t feel predictable,” he said on the One Decision podcast, revealing he’d talked over potential scenarios with pandemic experts. “I don’t want to torture people,” he explained. “There are scenarios that you could come up with that I would categorize as irresponsible. You know, that I would go, ‘That’s a big idea, but I’m not sure I want to put that idea out there, frankly.’ I do think about that.” His biggest concern with moving forward with the project, however, is the “potential consequences” of wading into the COVID discourse: “I don’t want to be noise. And noise to me is just things that are insincere, ultimately. If not downright cynical.”
