With the release of Doug Liman’s Locked Down, the next era of Hollywood seems to be focused on the last year of the world, or, more specifically, the pandemic. Reports from Deadline and Variety have confirmed that two more pandemic thrillers, Safer At Home and Tyger Tyger, have secured distribution rights. While both projects are pandemic driven narratives and will both be released in February of this year, the inception of their ideas and subsequent production could not be more different.

Vertical Entertainment, recently known for Yes, God, Yes(2019), Miss Juneteenth(2020), and Capone(2020), has acquired the  rights to Safer At Home. 

The flick is directed by Will Wernick with Wernick and Lia Bozonelis having written the screenplay. Safer At Home is set in 2022 Los Angeles with the coronavirus pandemic still ongoing. A group of friends have a party one night online where they all partake in a collective drug trip. The trip goes terrible wrong.

The film was produced during the pandemic earlier in 2020 and stars an ensemble of young actors in Alisa Allapach, Adwin Brown, Jocelyn Hudon, Dan J. Johnson, Michael Kupisk, Emma Lahana and Daniel Robaire. This film seems a lot more focused on tackling the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and envisioning it going on for years, simply getting worse as time goes on.

The other film, Tyger Tyger was actually made before the pandemic swept the world in early 2020. Written and directed by up in comer Kerry Mondragon, the film follows a young woman(Sam Quartin) after she robs a pharmacy of life saving medication during a pandemic. She teams up with a drug dealer(Dylan Sprouse) to distribute the medication to those in need. Gravitas Ventures has purchased the rights to the film.

With a young writer and director and young cast alongside a well-timed pandemic, this film seems destined to be something truly special. While there are many pandemic films on the horizon, Tyger Tyger, having been created before the worldwide events of 2020, seems to be the most interesting take on a pandemic in awhile. Typically pandemic stories focus on world leaders or older individuals, not people in their mid-20’s.

In a time where pandemic films are only beginning, it will be interesting to see where these films will rank in the onslaught of similar films set to be released in the coming months and years.

Both Safer At Home and Tyger Tyger are set for a release in February 2021.