Soderbergh’s Contagion Could Get TV Spinoff
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In 2011, director Steven Soderbergh released the pandemic disaster film Contagion. It was a big box office success, and now its screenwriter wants to find Contagion a new home on the small screen.
In an interview with Coming Soon, screenwriter Scott Z. Burns, while promoting his latest work, Side Effects, talked about possibly turning Contagion into a TV series. Burns says:
We’ve been talking about turning it into a TV series and I think it may have a life there. It has some of the properties inherently like Homeland and 24 where you can really explore outbreaks and pandemics in interesting ways. Like this story, they take you to unexpected places, whether it’s drug companies or governments or scientists or people with political agendas. All of these things, once they’re out there, can be coopted from a lot of different angles.
With last week’s release of David Fincher’s House of Cards on Netflix, it will be interesting to see if further high-profile shows opt to premiere on Netflix rather than standard network television. Soderbergh has praised the new Netflix original series, so perhaps he might be looking to follow in House of Cards‘ footsteps. And as for the source material, Contagion multi-layered and multi-character narrative, Contagion could make for a great show. Burns continues:
“That movie had an almost fractal kind of quality for me as a writer because anytime I looked at a business or a character, when it’s something like a virus, it changes everything. If you have a date with somebody and they’re sick and now you don’t go out with them to businessmen who don’t get on planes and don’t go to meetings, so certain things don’t happen. It becomes a causal agent for a whole bunch of plot.
Contagion follows different aspects of a worldwide viral outbreak that is threatening to kill off humanity and collapse government and corporate infrastructures. The film also examines the possible conspiracy theories that would go into finding a cure and containing the deadly disease. Contagion features actors Marion Cotillard, Matt Damon, Laurence Fishburne, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Kate Winslet. We’ll let you know when or if we hear more about it becoming a series.
