'Contagion' re-enters movie charts amid coronavirus fears

City councillors address stigmatizations City councillors Kristyn Wong-Tam, Joe Cressy and Mayor John Tory address the stigmatization of Chinese-Canadians communities.

TORONTO — A movie from 2011 about the spread of a deadly virus has jumped back into top movie rental charts in several countries.

Steven Soderbergh’s “Contagion” was the 42nd most popular movie on Canada’s iTunes charts Tuesday evening. In the U.S., it was in at number 10, and in the UK, it was number 29.

The star-studded thriller, which grossed more than $130 million worldwide, follows efforts to contain a pandemic that began after a businesswoman played by Gwyneth Paltrow is infected in Hong Kong. As the virus quickly spreads, social order collapses, aided in part by a popular conspiracy theorist played by Jude Law. The cast also included Marion Cotillard as an epidemiologist at WHO and Kate Winslet as a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) specialist helping to contain and explain the outbreak.

The movie has resurged amid fears surrounding a novel coronavirus that has killed more than 100 people in China, a fact pointed out by many social media users.

“For years I said that Contagion is one of the scariest films ever made and now here we are,” wrote Teen Wolf actor Stephen Ford on Twitter.

“I feel like we’re all just minor characters in Contagion,” wrote another user.

On Tuesday, health officials in B.C. announced the province had confirmed its first presumptive case of the virus, bringing the Canadian total to three. But experts continue to stress that the medical community is well equipped to handle the coronavirus having learned much from the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2003.