With binge-watch becoming the ideal quarantine activity, pandemic films are the new favourite genre across the world, says Chahak Mittal
There’s no trespassing in this city or the planet. I’m sorry! Earth is closed today.” Till a month back, this was just a dialogue by Tony Stark aka Robert Downey Jr in Avengers: Infinity Wars. But now, it is a lived reality. The shopping complexes, cafes and bars, cinema halls, theatres, museums, public centres, offices, and schools and colleges have downed their shutters and there is not a single soul on the streets amid the ongoing global pandemic of Coronavirus or COVID-19.
‘Netflix and chill’ was the buzzword for hanging out alone or with friends earlier but now, it’s the favourite ‘quarantine’ activity. And while people juggle with deciding on what to watch online, data shows that streaming and downloads of films, which show global crises or pandemics akin to the present one, have seen a sharp rise. One such is Contagion (2011), which gives the viewer a feeling of déjà vu as the film revolves around a family man (played by Matt Damon) who tries to navigate a partial societal collapse after a deadly virus spreads across the globe.
As per the data released by various sources, the film is becoming one of the most popular pandemic genre movies of 2020. According to iTunes, it is the third most popular film on the channel currently as well as the only film in the top 10 that didn’t come out in 2019 as every film that’s listed in the top 20 was released in 2019, except for this one. The film might have not garnered as much attention when it was first released due to its “unrealistic” and some “highly fictional” assumptions as claimed by many critics. There were sequences where a vaccine was developed really quickly and the film depicted that the virus reached humans through contact with animals.
However, today, it has returned to make the audience realise how it predicted the Coronavirus outbreak of 2020 long back in 2011. As per the data released on March 8 by The Verge and TorrentFreak, which collaborated to study the rise of number of downloads of Contagion between January 1 and March 4, thousands of people around the world were found to be illegally donwloading the pandemic film. The results were analysed by checking the IP addresses that shared the film and studying torrent tracker data. The study also said that before January 24, Contagion was torrented about 200 times per day around the world. On January 25, the number rose to 1,500. As per the US, after the virus started spreading there, the downloads were around 18,000 every day.
According to MUSO, a piracy analytics firm, Contagion downloads, from 546 on January 7, rose to over 30,000 by January 30. Such a high number of piracy visits of the film have proven what heights people reach up to when they are not able to stream any film that they want to watch.
As per the data by Google trends of the last 90 days, “Where can I watch Contagion?” became the ninth most searched query whereas “Contagion online,” “Contagion full movie download,” or “Contagion Netflix” became the 19th, 20th and 21st queries respectively. The film is now available on Amazon Prime Video and Google Play only in some countries.
Not just the surge, the film is also becoming a medium of learning about the situation for students. Rebecca Katz, director of the Centre for Global Health Science and Security at Georgetown University, recently revealed that she made her students watch the film’s ending to “educate them about the interconnectedness between animals, the environment and the humans.”
Film writer Scott Z Burns recently told a magazine, that while the disease in the film was more deadly than the COVID-19, Scott was more interested in using the virus to explore how the pre-existing conditions in society make us susceptible to fear as well as the virus. He said, “The similarities between Contagion and the Coronavirus are immaterial, accidental, and really not that important. What is more important is the societal response and the spread of fear and its knock-on effects, which are proving to be accurate” and that’s why the film is gaining popularity among netizens across the world. Director Steven Andrew Soderbergh also pointed out that Contagion feels “prescient” as it “not only gives an illuminating glimpse into what happened — but what might.”
Well, another film that has taken the internet and netizens by storm is Korean Netflix series My Secret Terrius, which was released in 2018. Viewers believe that the film had “predicted” the current virus outbreak. One of the sequences in episode 10 depicts a doctor and an information spy talking about a potential virus named Coronavirus, which has allegedly been tweaked to make its mortality rate reach 90 per cent as compared to the MERS, which only had 20 per cent mortality rate. The doctor says that “the Coronavirus has an incubation period of two to 14 days,” which is a more serious concern. She adds that the virus has been “manipulated to attack the lungs directly within just five minutes of being exposed.” The “mutant virus” could be used as a weapon and lead to a biochemical global terrorist attack. The film is unavailable or has been removed from the online platform in many countries now.
Other Hollywood films which are again making it big because of the pandemic scare are Pandemic: How to Prevent an Outbreak (American documentary series, a Netflix Original, 2020), Pandemic (2016), Outbreak (1995), Carriers (2009), the series, Containment (2016), I Am Legend (2007), and The Andromeda Strain (1971). As the virus claims more and more lives, the films show how the average person must maintain social distancing, try hard not to touch his or her face, and only stay indoors. Nothing else can be done until a solution is found, which wouldn’t happen overnight. Netflix Original film Bird Box (2018), which was a fictional and a metaphorical take on how a global pandemic can take over humanity, also depicted how people in order to survive must stay put in their homes to not let the plague reach them.
