When Warner Brothers was unable to secure the rights to Richard Preston's terrifying non-fiction book The Hot Zone (purchased by a rival studio), they took the basic idea of a fatal virus on the loose in the US, added Dustin Hoffman and director Wolfgang Petersen (Das Boot) and produced an unusual thriller--a surprise hit--called Outbreak. The other picture, slated to star Robert Redford and Jodie Foster, fell through. The premise of Outbreak, which owes something to Elia Kazan's 1950 plague-scare movie, Panic in the Streets, is as terrifying as it is timely. As developers slash their way deeper into the previously unexplored tropical rainforests, they are exposed to radically new forms of life, including diseases, that in these days of commonplace international travel could turn into deadly epidemics almost before we know it. Hoffman's character and his estranged wife (Rene Russo) are disease experts called in to identify the unknown killer, which was carried into the country by an illegally smuggled monkey. The best sequence shows the disease spreading--through recycled air on a passenger jet or a sneeze in a crowded cinema. The final chase is pretty conventional but the cast is terrific, including Morgan Freeman, Kevin Spacey, Donald Sutherland, Cuba Gooding Jr., J.T. Walsh and Zakes Mokae. --Jim Emerson
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Dustin Hoffman | Sam Daniels |
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Rene Russo | Robby Keough |
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Morgan Freeman | General Billy Ford |
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Kevin Spacey | Casey Schuler |
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Cuba Gooding Jr. | Major Salt |
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Donald Sutherland | General Donald McClintock |
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Patrick Dempsey | Jimbo Scott |
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Zakes Mokae | Dr. Benjamin Iwabi |
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Malick Bowens | Dr. Raswani |
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Susan Lee Hoffman | Dr. Lisa Aronson |
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Benito Martinez | Dr. Julio Ruiz |
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Bruce Jarchow | Dr. Mascelli |
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Leland Hayward III | Henry Seward |
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Daniel Chodos | Rudy Alvarez |
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Dale Dye | Colonel Briggs |
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Kara Keough | Kate Jeffries |
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Gina Menza | Mrs. Jeffries |
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Per Didrik Fasmer | Mr. Jeffries |
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Michelle Joyner | Sherry Mauldin |
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Donald Forrest | Mack Mauldin |
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Julie Pierce | Erica Mauldin |
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Tim Ransom | Tommy Hull |
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Michelle M. Miller | Darla Hull |
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Maury Sterling | Sandman One |
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Michael Emanuel | Sandman One Co-Pilot |
| Director | Wolfgang Petersen |
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| Writer | Laurence Dworet, Robert Roy Pool | |
| Producer | Stephen Joel Brown, Nana Greenwald, Duncan Henderson, Gail Katz, Anne Kopelson, Arnold Kopelson, Sanford Panitch, Wolfgang Petersen | |
| Musician | James Newton Howard | |
| Photography | Michael Ballhaus | |
| Packaging | Snap Case |
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| Nr Discs | 1 |
| Screen Ratios | Widescreen (1.85:1) |
| Audio Tracks | Dolby Digital 5.1 [English] |
| Subtitles | Croatian | Czech | English | Greek | Icelandic | Polish | Turkish |
| Distributor | Warner Home Video |
| Layers | Single side, Dual layer |
| Edition Release Date | May 11, 1998 |
| Regions | Region 2 |