Steven Soderbergh just never stops working. The 57-year-old director recently released his HBO Max film Let Them All Talk, which starred Meryl Streep and Lucas Hedges, he’s currently in post-production on his new crime thriller, No Sudden Move, starring Matt Damon and Benicio Del Toro, and we’ve just learned that he’s developing a “philosophical sequel” to his 2011 pandemic thriller, Contagion.  

Contagion saw a huge spike in popularity at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic earlier this year. In a recent interview on the Happy. Sad. Confused. Podcast, Soderbergh was asked if a sequel was in the works.  

“Not in a literal sense,” Soderbergh said. “I’ve got a project in development that Scott Burns is working with me on, that’s a kind of philosophical sequel to Contagion, but in a different context. You’ll kind of look at the two of them as kind of paired, but very different hair colors. So, Scott and I had been talking about, ‘So, what’s the next iteration of a Contagion-type story?’ We have been working on that; we should probably hot foot it a little bit.” 

The project seems to be in very early stages, but Soderbergh is known to turn out acclaimed feature-length films in record time. If all goes well, the director wants to start shooting the pseudo-sequel in Spring.  

“I’m hoping by the spring that things will have changed to an extent that the pure scale of COVID protocols for production have been diminished a little bit,” Soderbergh said. 

After putting the final touches on No Sudden Move, the Oscar winning director is also set to produce the upcoming Academy Awards in early 2021.