Scott Z. Burns, the screenwriter who has made his living collaborating with Steven Soderbergh lately (THE INFORMANT!, CONTAGION, and SIDE EFFECTS), chatted about the possibility of seeing more CONTAGION, the popular movie that starred everyone in Hollywood and concerned a pandemic disease. Instead of a rumored sequel they may be headed to TV! Read on.
Burns: “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 co-opted from a lot of different angles.”
What ideas didn’t make it into the movie that could be utilized? “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.”
It’ll be interesting to see what happens with this, but it’s not hard to imagine a TV network being interested, as it’s a well known property and has the added cache of being from Soderbergh and Burns. If there must be more CONTAGION, then I like the idea of this.
