When a global event such as the coronavirus occurs, it is common for televisions to fill their grills with content that may allude to or remember what is happening . Apart from news and special programs this also ends up splashing into fiction.
Telecinco, for example, a few days ago issued two chapters of the series The Good Doctor entitled ‘Epidemic’. In them, medical staff must take care of two patients with a virus that can be transmitted through the air, leading to a hospital quarantine . Chance? It seems not.
TV networks can be accused of taking advantage of the situation to gain more audience by including such content. But the truth is that it is also the viewers themselves who seek to consume these stories.
This is the conclusion that can be drawn if you take a look at the most viewed movies on iTunes in recent weeks. Contagion, a film with almost a decade of life, has become one of the most rented of the Apple platform. It would be in the top 10 of the most booked by US users of the service. Additionally, it is the second most-watched Warner Bros movie for 2020.
Obviously, this success would not have been possible had it not been for everything that is happening with the coronavirus. The fear of the disease and the first cases of deaths in the US would have triggered their rents. What could happen? What could be the worst possible scenario? To add to the paranoia, nothing like watching a Hollywood pandemic movie.
The World Health Organization has declared a public health emergency at the end of January and assesses that the risk of the new coronavirus is “very high.” However, the virus that appears in Contagion is much more deadly and cinematic than Covid-19.
A warning film, not to instill fear
In light of this unexpected success of the film, its producer, Michael Shamberg, has explained to Buzzfeed that his intention in filming it was not “to try to scare people into thinking that they are all going to die.”
He has clarified that what they wanted was “to try to scare people so they could do something.” Thus, he acknowledges that it was “deliberately designed to be a warning film . We get the science right. “
Contagion was released in 2011. It is directed by Steven Soderbergh and stars Matt Damon, Jude Law, Kate Winslet, Laurence Fishburne and Gwyneth Paltrow.
In the movie Gwyneth Paltrow (Beth) meets her lover when she returns from a business trip to Hong Kong. She catches what looks like a cold on her way home, and when her son Clark arrives, he also acquires the same symptoms. Seeing that her husband is getting serious, Mitch (Matt Damon) takes her to the hospital.
From there more and more people are infected and representatives of the Department of Homeland Security begin to collaborate with the Center and Disease Control to find a vaccine for the strange virus.
