By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com
Sex & The City… As Dead As SJP Wants It To Be
The never reliable Daily Mail (UK) published some story about Sarah Jessica & The Girls giving up on any future Sex & The City films. The source… “Grazia.”
Okay.
Simple math. The film, however hideous, grossed about $250 million worldwide.
SJP is the only member of this group that may ever see a seven-figure offer again… or in recent years.
So… it’s simple. If she wants S&TC 3 to happen, it will. If not, not.
To make it happen, she’ll need to do the film for the same – or maybe less – than the first feature. The budget will have to fit a projected $150 million worldwide gross. And if she is willing to do it for that, it will happen.
By the way, no SJP-starring film, other than Sex, has ever grossed as much as that $150m. It would still be a big movie for her too.
Pay $1 million per for the other three women, scale and back-end for SJP… below the line of $30 million… and voila, you have a movie.
And you know what? With less ego and less money, there is some chance that they will find the spirit of the series again.
One problem perhaps worth mentioning… if they wait too long or not long enough, the whole thing will dry up. In 20 years, they can do a revival with the four women watching 20something women do what 20something women are doing then. Or they can do S&TC3 in 2014, at the latest.
Part of the problem is that these actresses are already a little (okay…maybe more than a little) stuck in between young and old. I would probably take a leap in time that doesn’t match reality, and give Charlotte and Miranda teens or at least pre-teens as Carrie gives birth at 45. Endless sexual ennui just isn’t very attractive in women of that age… even for women of that age… at least at the movies.
Why don’t they do what aging action stars, or their producers, always seem to do nowadays: hook them up with a younger sidekick to hedge their bets (“Live Free or Die Hard” is a recent example). Add one or two younger women to the mix, with Carrie and company taking the new girls under their wing and giving them all kinds of fun advice, some of which might work out and some of which will lead to disastrous hijinks. Then, if the new girls catch on… there’s your FOURTH movie.
Making the government of Abu Dhabi angry is one thing. Pissing off the target audience is another.
Here’s a sequel to a hit movie based on a long-running TV show, fueled by corporate synergy, boosted with breathless hype, promoted with product tie-ins, released with a hard sell at inflated prices … and its total gross in the USA is under $100 million. Put those elements together and the product is the most blatant example of a Rip-Off Summer.
Time Warner and Village Roadshow are gonna look long and hard at the post-mortem. No more sequels for this overhyped franchise. Make movies that grown-ups can relate to, just don’t bury them in the arthouse.
Sex and the City 2 had some good things in it. The ideas about creating your own rules in a relationship and doing what works for you were pretty bold and challenging for a Hollywood movie, and I liked the scene between Miranda and Charlotte at the bar in Abu Dhabi.
Everything else was incredibly lazy.