Guess Who Was Going to Die in Sex and the City 3 ?
Sex and the City 3 isn’t happening—but apparently the swirling chatter about it still is. And it turns out that had the SATC trilogy gone forth with more cosmos and Islamophobia, a very major character was slated to die. According to Season 5 of journalist and Vanity Fair contributor James Andrew Miller’s Origins podcast, which deep-dives into how the Hollywood success story started, the would-be third Sex and the City movie would have brought the death of—drumroll—Mr. Big, aka John Preston, played by the inimitable Chris Noth, who was slated to die of heart attack in the shower.
Ironically enough, Noth tells the podcast that he was no fan of the first and second film adaptations (same here)—“I just hate the cornball shit . . . I thought they were sentimental as hell,” he said. But Noth had heard good things about the script for the hypothetical third installment: “I heard it was really a superior script.”
The dramatic plot twist was yet another reason Kim Cattrall declined to sign on for Sex and the City 3, according to Miller’s sources. “People close to Kim believe the script for the movie didn’t have a lot to offer the character of Samantha,” Miller says on Origins, adding that Big’s death early in the film made “the remainder of the movie more about how Carrie recovers from Big’s death than about the relationship between the four women.” So it was all about Carrie—again? Color me utterly unsurprised. (Can we even imagine how insufferable Carrie’s widow couture would have been?)
Of course, money also played a role in the untimely end of SATC 3. Miller reports that Cattrall wasn’t satisfied with the salary proposal for the franchise’s four famed ladies, which proposed that each of them—Cattrall, Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon, and Kristin Davis—be paid $1 million up front, and share back-end revenues with showrunner Michael Patrick King. “We negotiated in good faith. We wanted Kim to be there. Michael and I worked all summer. I had many, many, many conversations with her manager where I was told, ‘She’d love to hear from you.’ I emailed her. I tried to reach out to her and say, like, ‘We want you [to be] part of this . . . I hope when you read this script you’ll see the beauty, the joy, the heartbreak in it that I see,’ ” Parker told Miller. “We did negotiate through the process, and ultimately the studio said, ‘We can’t meet those asks of hers. We’re not able to do it . . . the economics don’t make sense for us.’ So, then, it’s over, but that’s not a character assassination—that’s just the way business works.” Cattrall declined comment, claiming she’s said her piece on the would-be movie.
I can’t help but wonder: Is this the final chapter of the Sex and the City 3 saga? Here’s hoping. Now back to your regularly scheduled Woke Charlotte reading.
