There is much to learn from the box-office performance of Sex and the City and the fact that its $56 million three-day opening wildly exceeded industry expectations. This is a movie about four women over forty, one of whom actually turns fifty before the story ends. The last movie about women in an age bracket most Hollywood executives would prefer to ignore that enjoyed any significant attention at all was The First Wives Club back in 1996, and while Wives was a success, it was not in league with Sex as a cultural phenomenon.
It has been reported that a sequel to Sex is under consideration, if not already in the works. That’s great news for the movie business, but what does it say about television? It should not be forgotten that, like The X-Files: Fight the Future in 1998, Sex is more an episode of a beloved television series greatly expanded for presentation on a much larger screen and served up as a group viewing experience than an original feature film. Female television viewers by the thousands poured into movie theaters to be reunited with Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha, just fans of the science-fiction series The X-Files flocked in droves to multiplexes to spend extra time with FBI Special Agents Mulder and Scully. (One huge difference: The X-Files movie debuted while its foundation series was still on the air.)
With all due respect to the movie business and its mighty marketing machines, which can power even the foulest swill into box-office gold over one weekend, the success of Sex (and The X-Files before it) has everything to do with the power of television, in first run and rerun, on broadcast and cable, on demand and on DVD. (All apply to Sex and its afterlife.) Its six-season run on HBO (fueled by the outstanding publicity and promotion for which the pay-cable giant is known) was as responsible for how well Sex performed this weekend as anything else.
So what should HBO—which apparently had little to do with the movie itself beyond bringing some of the players together at the start—take away from this (beyond trying to convince David Chase that a theatrical continuation of The Sopranos in some form might not be a bad idea)? Given the well-documented challenges it has faced in finding bold new series to fill the void that opened up when The Sopranos, Sex and the City and Six Feet Under closed down, maybe it would be worth making something old new again, rather than starting entirely from scratch.
I wonder: Would a new version of Sex and the City that focused on four twenty-something women navigating the New York City of this new millennium find an audience of its own? It might, if it were carefully crafted as a continuation of the concept rather than a spin-off of the original, which would invite too many immediate comparisons and likely kill it out of the gate.
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