With Contagion's uniformly excellent ensemble and extensive location shooting, there have been set photos online over the last year, but these are indeed the first dyed-in-the-wool official stills.

Not present in these pictures but definitely showing up in the film are Kate Winslet, Marion Cotillard, Laurence Fishburne, Bryan Cranston, Sanaa Lathan, John Hawkes, Elliott Gould, Enrico Colantoni, and Demetri Martin. 

If the cast doesn't convince you of the potential for greatness in Contagion, give the first trailer a watch.  It promises a disconcertingly plausible and bleak scenario, depicting a societal breakdown as a highly lethal and crazy-contagious virus ravages the globe.  I, for one, am hugely excited to see a director of Steven Soderbergh's caliber handling such nightmarish yet realistic material.  The screenplay was written by Scott Z. Burns, who wrote Soderbergh's  Damontastic The Informant! and contributed to the Damonlicious The Bourne Ultimatum.

Contagion spreads like plague in theaters on September 9th.