UPDATE, 3/4 @ 2:29 PM CT: A spokesperson for Warner Bros., Contagion’s distributor, tells BuzzFeed News that, in addition to the film’s number 10 spot on the iTunes charts, it’s currently at number 21 on Google Play and is trending on Amazon. “It was very deliberately designed to be a cautionary film,” producer Michael Shamberg tells the outlet, noting the many experts who consulted on the movie. “We got the science right.”
With China’s coronavirus outbreak making headlines—as well as a worrying jump overseas to Los Angeles—it seems everyone’s in the mood for a little catharsis by way of revisiting Contagion. Not that anyone should ever need an excuse to revisit Steven Soderbergh’s paranoiac outbreak thriller, which featured a riveting turn from Gwyneth Paltrow’s disembodied head—making its highly-anticipated return to the big screen over 15 years after its debut in Se7en. Whether experiencing the film’s stomach-turning thrills for the first time or simply checking in for a long-overdue revisit, people have been watching Contagion so much that it has found its way onto iTunes’ Top Movie List. As spotted by Deadline, the Soderbergh film is sitting in 14th place on the chart, where it is currently more popular than Maleficent: Mistress Of Evil—but less popular than Rambo: Last Blood, thus proving that morbid curiosity is indeed an illness more alarming and lethal than your average super virus.
Starring Kate Winslet, Jude Law, Elliott Gould, Matt Damon, and the criminally-underrated Jennifer Ehle, Contagion tracks the mass outbreak of a deadly virus via the government officials, scientists, and medical experts struggling to contain it. And also Matt Damon, whose wife (Paltrow’s Goopy head) is to blame for this whole fucking ordeal. If you have an iTunes account (which is all but government-mandated at this point) and you’re feeling the urge to watch the kind of movie that will make your skin itch, Contagion is the girl for you. If we all pull together and rent this thing, we can make Contagion more popular on that arbitrary iTunes movie list than Joker—or, at the very least, Rambo: Last Blood. Let’s give our dads the what-for.