HOLLYWOOD, CA—Understanding that Americans desperately need an escape from the non-stop, grim Covid-19 news, Steven Soderbergh, who directed the very popular 2011 original, announced the surprise release of “Contagion 2: Holy Crap, We’re All Gonna Die!” on Netflix today.
“Until recently, it never crossed my mind to do a sequel,” said Soderbergh, “but you watch the news, and this pandemic stuff is just awful. It goes from bad to worse to catastrophic to apocalyptic. So I said to myself ‘Enough already!’ It was time to bring some light and hope to people’s lives by making a movie about a deadly, ruthless microbe.”
The movie was filmed in record time. “I really only had to shoot one or two scenes; there was already so much great footage available,” said an excited Soderbergh.
Contagion 2 follows the outbreak of a fictional lethal virus called Moronavirus in a fake Chinese town called Buhan that eventually spreads all across the globe. If that sounds far-fetched, that’s by design, according to Soderbergh. “This is Hollywood. People want to be taken on wild adventures that would never happen to them in real life.”
With the film’s whopping run time of 4 hours, Soderbergh believes viewers will completely lose themselves in it and forget all about what’s happening outside. The word “coronavirus” won’t enter people’s minds even once while they’re watching the all-star cast that includes: Tom Hanks, Rita Wilson, Idris Elba, Andy Cohen, and Prince Charles, with special cameos by Rudy Gobert, Kevin Durant, Boris Johnson, Placido Domingo, and Chris Cuomo.
(SPOILER ALERT) Early reviews say that the film comes to a soaring conclusion when the global Moronavirus pandemic that wiped out half the world’s population mercifully comes to an end (hooray!)…only to see the hopeless, desolate world left behind quickly descend into chaos and cataclysmic nuclear warfare that annihilates the other half. Viewers, undoubtedly, will leave feeling thoroughly entertained, relieved of all of their anxieties, and desperately wanting more. But, alas, it’s only a movie.
