Michael Bay to produce depressingly bleak thriller where this pandemic never ends

Why did the chicken cross the road? Because it saw someone else down the block and wanted to be a good person by practicing social distancing. Sorry, that’s just a little pandemic humor that we wanted to use to lighten the mood before we get into the actual news here, which is extremely not fun. According to Deadline, former Paramount exec Adam Goodman is working with Michael Bay to produce a “pandemic thriller” that’s “in the spirit of Paranormal Activity and Cloverfield” called Songbird.

Set a couple of years in the future, Songbird takes place in a world where the coronavirus pandemic is still going on, with lockdowns being rolled back too early and then reinstated “as the virus continues to mutate” and becomes even worse than before. (Here are the YouTube results for “dogs and cats that are friends” if you need something less miserable.) Deadline also suggests that the plot doesn’t involve any “supernatural elements,” so it’s literally just “people eased up on virus restrictions and then it got way worse,” which is a real thing that might happen in real life. Also, just in case it wasn’t clear enough that this is capitalizing on very real anxieties, Deadline says it’s going to start production in just five weeks and will be filmed in mid-lockdown Los Angeles. It’s unclear what that specifically means, but director Adam Mason (who made a couple of Hulu’s Into The Dark installments) has apparently gotten approval from the relevant filmmaking guilds and there won’t be any scenes where people interact face-to-face—so at least we can be reasonably sure that nobody’s going to get the actual virus during the making of this virus movie.

Whoops, we just remembered there’s an actual virus going on and that virus-hungry idiots recently trampled over each other so they could pack bars in Wisconsin as soon as the soulless Republicans in the state’s government decided that ending the lockdown as soon as possible would be a fun way to stick it to the Democrat governor, potentially undoing any good that was accomplished by keeping people in lockdown in the first place. The movie sounds pretty bleak, but hopefully it at least has fewer people who are actively trying to be evil. (Now we’re sad again, and dogs and cats that are friends isn’t going to cut it this time. Here’s “babies laughing at cute animals.”)