30 Great Movies About Viral Outbreaks

2020 and 2021 will forever be remembered as the era of COVID-19 – a terribly contagious strain of the Coronavirus.

Life imitates art almost as often as art imitates life – and, over the years, there have been countless movies that depicted viral outbreaks on a massive scale (some depicting events with eerie similarities to what we experienced in the real world over the course of the last year or so).

Now that we’re clawing our way out of this terrible ordeal, it’s definitely worth comparing what we’ve been through with how similar situations have been depicted on the big screen.

In this article, we’ll take a look at thirty of the best movies about viral outbreaks…

30. World War Z (2013)

We could easily fill this list with zombie movies – that would be easy to do – but we won’t. There will, however, inevitably be a few – and World War Z simply has to be one of them.

While some zombie movie outbreaks start supernaturally or due to radiation (Night of the Living Dead, for example), others are indeed viral – World War Z included.

Based on Max Brooks’ novel, it stars Brad Pitt – and while no cure is found in the movie, humans do find a way to camouflage themselves from the hordes.

29. It Comes At Night (2017)

It Comes at Night is a fantastic movie about a horrific global virus outbreak, that sees a family secluding themselves from the outside world in light of it.

However, their situation gets flipped upside down when a second family shows up to the house in desperate need of refuge.

Starring Joel Edgerton, it’s a real slow-burner that’s worth watching until the very last moment – even if the ending is genuinely one of the bleakest in recent movie history!