Steven Soderbergh confirms 'psychological sequel' to Contagion is in the works

Director and producer Steven Soderbergh has said he is preparing “a kind of philosophical sequel” to his pandemic thriller Contagion, which has scored newfound relevance during the coronavirus outbreak.

The filmmaker said the “next iteration” of the story will be set in a “new context”.

The 2011 film originally starred Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow and Kate Winslet, and appeared in the top 10 on Netflix after the public were handed out Government restrictions and advised to stay at home.

The plot of Contagion's focused on a mysterious virus which originated in Hong Kong before travellers returning to America brought it with them and infected the entire population.

It follows healthcare professionals, government officials and everyday people who find themselves in the midst of a deadly pandemic, as scientists race to find a cure.

“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," he told the Happy Sad Confused podcast.

“You’ll kind of look at the two of them as kind of paired but they are very different hair colours. So, Scott and I had been talking about, ‘What’s the next iteration of a Contagion-type story?’," he said. “We have been working on that. We should probably hotfoot it a little bit."

The 57-year-old has also been working on a sequel to his 1989 breakthrough movie Sex, Lies and Videotape and recently revealed that Andie MacDowell and Laura San Giacomo will reprise their roles as sisters Ann Bishop Mullany and Cynthia Patrice Bishop respectively.

The Oscar-winning director said: "Within the first six or seven weeks of the lockdown, I finished three screenplays. One of them was a rewrite, one of them was an original, and one was an adaptation of a novel that I've been wanting to do.

"The original was a sequel to Sex, Lies and Videotape. It was an idea that had been circling for a while, and I felt like I came up with a way to get back in, and so I wrote it, and I wanna make it."

Photo credit: Warner Bros.