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Steven Soderbergh and writer Scott Z. Burns are working on a 'philosophical' sequel to their harrowing 2011 pandemic drama Contagion, Yahoo Movies reports. 

Speaking to the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Soderbergh confirmed the plans, but added that it won't be a direct sequel "in a literal sense".

“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,” he said.

“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 first movie was inspired by a combination of the 2002 outbreak of SARS and the 2009 flu pandemic.

It found Gwyneth Paltrow's travelling businesswoman at the centre of a deadly virus outbreak, with Marion Cotillard, Laurence Fishburne and Kate Winslet as the virologists and epidemiologists fighting to trace and contain the disease.

In a prescient piece of storytelling, Jude Law played a charlatan conspiracy theorist who seeds panic in order to profit from it.

The movie received renewed interest in March this year, as it climbed the iTunes chart in the wake of the growing coronavirus pandemic.