Trailer
Plot summary
Beth Emhoff returns to Minneapolis from a Hong Kong business trip with a fever she takes for jet lag. Within days she is dead, her young son Clark too, and cases of the same illness appear in Hong Kong and London. Mitch Emhoff, her husband, is kept apart from others while doctors study him; his teenage daughter Jory joins him at home. At the CDC, Dr. Ellis Cheever sends the Epidemic Intelligence Service officer Dr. Erin Mears to Minneapolis to list everyone Beth met. The virus resists every attempt to grow it in a lab, while the blogger Alan Krumwiede tells his readers that a homeopathic remedy made from forsythia cured him. In Hong Kong, the WHO epidemiologist Dr. Leonora Orantes looks for the first case.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Contagion (2011)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- British Health Secretary Matt Hancock said in February 2021 that watching the scramble for vaccines in Contagion led him to order far more COVID-19 vaccine doses for the UK than his own advisers recommended, speeding up the country's rollout.
- The chain of contagion involving bats and pigs recalls the trail of the real Nipah virus, which originated in Malaysia in 1997 and similarly involved the disturbance of a bat colony by deforestation; the film even uses a Nipah virus protein model on screen.
- The film surged back into popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic, becoming the seventh most-watched film on iTunes, HBO Now's most-viewed title for two straight weeks, and seeing a 5,609 percent jump in piracy-site traffic in one month.
- For the Civic Center set, over 2,000 extras were sought for background roles; Screen Actors Guild members were paid $139 per day while nonunion workers received $64. Renting Candlestick Park for six days cost the production $60,000.
- Screenwriter Scott Z. Burns researched the film by consulting smallpox-eradication veteran Larry Brilliant, who introduced him to epidemiologist W. Ian Lipkin, and through them the production also gained perspectives from World Health Organization representatives.
- Burns also met with journalist Laurie Garrett, author of the 1995 book The Coming Plague, whose research helped him shape possible plotlines for the film.
- Director Steven Soderbergh announced in December 2020 that a "philosophical sequel" to Contagion was in development, but he later confirmed in April 2026 that the project had been canceled.
