Carrie Bradshaw may be a best-selling author with a beloved newspaper column and a freelance rate of $4 a word at Vogue, but she’s no match for real-life counterpart Sarah Jessica Parker. Per Variety, Parker, Cynthia Nixon, and Kristin Davis are reportedly each set to earn more than $1 million per episode for the upcoming revival of Sex and the City, titled And Just Like That... The HBO Max reboot, announced Sunday, is a 10-episode, half-hour limited series that will catch up with the beloved characters more than a decade after the second film. Reps for the actors and HBO Max did not respond to Variety’s requests for comment; Vanity Fair has also reached out for comment.
As Variety notes, this lucrative salary is par for the course for reboots of this nature. Most recently, HBO Max reportedly doled out at least $2.5 million apiece to the cast of Friends for a pandemic-delayed reunion special. Stars like Kerry Washington, Reese Witherspoon, and Steve Carell have commanded huge $1 million-per-episode paydays for streaming shows like Little Fires Everywhere on Hulu and Space Force on Netflix, respectively.
Fans have been waiting a decade for a potential new installment in the world of Sex and the City. The Emmy-winning HBO series was a hit when it premiered more than 20 years ago, introducing viewers to Carrie, Miranda, Samantha, and Charlotte, four best friends living in a glossy version of Manhattan filled with wacky, eligible bachelors, rosy cosmos, and teetering Manolo Blahniks. After the series ended in 2004, it was followed up by two feature films in 2008 and 2010. (We don’t really need to talk about the latter film, though.) In the last few years, rumors of a third film began bubbling to the surface, encouraged by Parker, who produced the series and the films. A miniseries is a welcome surprise, following the explosion of trendy series reboots and the post-Peak TV boom.
And Just Like That… will follow Carrie, Charlotte, and Miranda as they deal with life and love in their 50s. Kim Cattrall, who played Samantha, will not be part of the series due to her unfortunate, long-standing beef with Parker. It’s unclear how the show will handle her departure, but we’ve got a few theories.
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