Unsubstantiated Rumor of the Day: Blake Lively to Reboot ‘Sex and the City’?

Daniel D'Addario — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 14:44:01 -0400

British tabloids report--and take this with a grain of salt the size of Manhattan--that the Sex and the City film series (which all began with a column in the Observer) is to be rebooted, based on author Candace Bushnell's teen novel The Carrie Diaries. Director Michael Patrick King is said to want Blake Lively for the story of Carrie's origins in New York, though Sarah Jessica Parker played a new-to-New York Carrie in a Sex and the City 2 flashback.

While we're unsure that Lively would be willing to take another teen role after Gossip Girl, or that she'd ever be asked, this move makes a perverse sort of sense. Franchises suffering diminishing returns have lately hit reset and begun again, as with Columbia's upcoming Spider-Man relaunch that takes Peter Parker back to high school, or Warner Brothers's latest, announced attempt to revive Superman. And the girly HBO franchise is in limbo: Sex and the City 2 left Carrie Bradshaw creatively unrevivable--where does one go after Dubai?--and yet she's still a lucrative property. A reboot may be the only way to squeeze money from the Sex and the City idea, as Columbia, Warner, and Candace Bushnell all already knew.

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

Observer » Unsubstantiated Rumor of the Day: Blake Lively to Reboot ‘Sex and the City’?

Unsubstantiated Rumor of the Day: Blake Lively to Reboot ‘Sex and the City’?