Steven Soderbergh doesn't want to manifest anything with hypothetical Contagion sequel

Soderbergh has some "terrifying" ideas, but he doesn't want to be "irresponsible."

By Emma Keates | April 3, 2025 | 9:21am

Screenshot: Warner Bros./YouTube

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Steven Soderbergh doesn't want to manifest anything with hypothetical Contagion sequel

With one pandemic still ongoing and the threat of another lurking on the horizon, Steven Soderbergh doesn’t want to give the universe any ideas. He and his team do “talk about” a sequel to his 2011 film Contagion and have “come up with some terrifying ideas,” he said in a recent interview on the One Decision podcast (per The Guardian). Still, he kindly “[doesn’t] want to torture people” with either flashbacks to past trauma or a litany of new fears. “There are scenarios that you could come up with that I would categorise as irresponsible,” he said. “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.”

At the same time, he has been talking to scientists and pandemic experts about the hypothetical followup. “There would have to be, I think, a plot that doesn’t feel predictable,” he explained.

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It’s a big task, as the first Contagion, which starred Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law, Laurence Fishburne, Kate Winslet and Marion Cotillard, became so tied to some people’s experience of the COVID-19 pandemic. It even helped inform U.K. vaccine policy, The Guardian reports. Still, there were some things that Soderbergh and his consultants couldn’t predict. “They found a vaccine in the movie faster than you would have been able to then. In the interim, a couple of years before Covid, new technology allowed us to get to a vaccine in a shockingly short period of time,” he said. “That’s insane how fast that happened and how many lives were saved. This typically when we made Contagion would have been three to four years.”

While that’s an example of a positive manifestation, Soderbergh isn’t taking any chances. “I think about [being responsible] whenever I’m about to unleash something to the public, whether that’s a post or a movie or a TV show or an article, I think it’s important to run through the potential consequences of what you’re saying. And first of all, I would hope that whatever you’re saying is true and that it’s defensible and that you can lay out the logic of what you’re saying,” he explained. “But secondly, I don’t want to contribute to what I consider to be noise. I want to be signal. I don’t want to be noise. And noise to me is just things that are insincere, ultimately. If not downright cynical.”