Director Steven Soderbergh Teases Plastics Could Be A Horrific Entry Point For ‘Contagion’ Sequel

Director Steven Soderbergh is back in theaters with his spy thriller “Black Bag,” and is doing the press rounds leading to questions about making a follow-up to his 2011 pandemic drama “Contagion,” which got a boost during the COVID-19 lockdown as the film sort of mirrored the chaos leading up to the development of a vaccine to a mystery illness that jumped from animals into the human population.

Speaking with Variety, the workhorse filmmaker teased some ideas that could end up going into a “Contagion” sequel (he is mulling over with screenwriter Scott Z. Burns) including microplastics (in our blood and brains) and their potential impact on human health and our abilities to survive in the future.

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“We’ve talked about it. It would have to be about something new, but also something that’s plausible. Part of the reason people were able to find resonance in that movie when it opened, and then 10 years later when the pandemic happened, was it was rooted in reality. We’ve got to find a new gimmick, but it’s got to be something that people go, ‘Oh, that could happen.'”

Soderbergh considers the film within the horror genre and would need another scary-as-hell concept for a sequel, which he might already have in mind and is already a looming threat that could be just as disastrous as a deadly virus.

“It would need to be something that’s going on right now that just needs a tiny little shove to turn into a huge thing. To me, ‘Contagion’ was a horror movie. So the trick would be, can you find something as scary that’s real? There’s certainly a case to be made, especially in the West, for the long-term effects, environmentally, of what we eat, what we breathe. As is well known, we have plastic in our blood now. It’s in our brains. This is a new thing that’s got to have a pretty serious effect. There’s lots of possibilities.”

While we’ve been a little puzzled as to why Soderbergh has never tackled a Western, the director also briefly revealed in this interview the reasoning behind that, “I’m scared of horses.”

This wouldn’t be an entirely new film concept as David Cronenberg‘s near-future body horror film “Crimes of The Future” featured people being able to eat and digest plastics via medical enhancements. However, we have to imagine there would be an expectation that Burns and Soderbergh’s take would likely be a much more grounded take on plastics impacting the globe and human society, although, the horrific angle would remain.

Despite the filmmaker’s hot streak of churning out films as often as humanly possible, we don’t know exactly when he’ll get around to his “Contagion” sequel.