by Thinus Ferreira
As part of a quick-turnaround acquisition and programming move the South African public broadcaster on Friday decided to schedule the 2011 Steven Soderbergh horror/thriller film Contagion as the new Sunday night movie for SABC3 on 5 April 2020 at 21:30.
Contagion will start on Sunday at 21:30 on SABC3, with the film The Rewrite that would have started then, pushed to a new starting time of 23:30.
According to insiders who whispered to TVwithThinus, the Contagion scheduling order comes from SABC CEO Madoda Mxakwe himself, who personally requested all of the SABC's channels, including SABC1 and SABC2 to try and broadcast the film as part of an awareness effort to educate all South Africans about Covid-19 and what can happen when people don't heed best advice during a viral pandemic.
The Contagion promo line is "Nothing spreads like fear" and stars Laurence Fishburne, Matt Damon, Kate Winslet, Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow.
While average families suddenly fight to try and stay alive as society begins to unravel and collapse because of the onset and rapid spread of an extremely dangerous worldwide disease, desperate political leaders and scientists battle to try and find a vaccine.
Despite being over a decade old but with its newfound relevance, internationally Contagion has suddenly shot up in the charts of most-requested and most-watched films on the list of library movies on Amazon Prime Video and iTunes and is still in the number one spot after two weeks. Sharing on torrent sites of the film has also increased vastly worldwide.
The Contagion screenwriter Scott Z. Burns told Fortune magazine that "The similarities between our contagion and the coronavirus are immaterial, accidental, and really not that important. What is more important and accurate is the societal response and the spread of fear and the knock-on effects of that. That is proving to be accurate."
"When I originally pitched this idea to Steven Soderbergh, I said I wanted Contagion to be as grounded in science as it possibly could be. I I didn’t want to do a Hollywood disaster movie that played loose with the science. The heroes needed to be scientists."
