Hot on the heels of Contagion comes the other film Steven Soderbergh made this year (not counting his second-unit work on The Hunger Games). Haywire is the action vehicle Soderbergh built around Mixed Martial Arts star Gina Carano. You can't really recognise her in the poster that's just arrived, but it's still pretty damn cool. Although without the gun, the activity she's engaged in here might possibly be misconstrued...
"Haywire has a bit of our special sauce in it," Soderbergh told Empire recently. "I’d like to think that even when we make things that are supposed to be straightforwardly entertaining, there are some other aspects that keep them from being disposable. It was great fun, because it required a different skill-set than I'm used to. I hadn't shot fights like this before, so I had to educate myself.
"Gina is a natural athlete and she really delivered in some brutal fights, but for all that, I think my favourite scene in the movie is a foot-chase in Barcelona. I could watch her run forever. We've also got a very odd little car chase, and some cat-and-mouse in a house where the lights go out. We didn't really have enough money to blow anything up though!"
Alongside Carano, Haywire (the movie formerly known as Knockout) stars Michael Fassbender, Ewan McGregor, Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, Bill Paxton and Channing Tatum. Lem Dobbs wrote the screenplay, and it's out in the UK on January 20. Contagion arrives on October 21.