Sex and the City‘s move to Netflix introduces the show to a whole new audience, but that doesn’t mean author Candace Bushnell will get to reap the benefits.
Bushnell, 65, confirmed to The Sunday Times earlier this month that she will not receive royalties from the streaming service.
“The way men do business is a ponzi scheme,” she said. “All of these men who are in charge of things, they just keep moving these cards around to make money because every time they move the cards around somebody’s skimming.”
Bushnell added: “The percentage of women in the 1 percent who made their own money is about 3.5 percent, and that’s shocking.”
The journalist penned the columns that inspired the original ’90s series. After Sex and the City premiered on HBO, the show expanded into two movies and a prequel titled The Carrie Diaries aired on The CW. Bushnell was paid $100,000 for the screen rights to Sex and the City and it remains unclear how much she paid for the subsequent projects.
Netflix and Warner Bros. Discovery reached a deal in January to license all six seasons of the HBO series beginning in early April. The two films and the show’s revival series, And Just Like That, will remain solely on Max.
Sex and the City premiered in 1998 and focused on Carrie’s (Sarah Jessica Parker) dating life in New York. Her friends Charlotte (Kristin Davis), Miranda Hobbes (Cynthia Nixon) and Samantha (Kim Cattrall) also played a large role in the series. Everyone but Cattrall, 67, reprised their roles when And Just Like That premiered on Max in December 2021.
Two months after AJLT premiered, Bushnell weighed in on the story lines.
“I’m really startled by a lot of the decisions made in the reboot,” she told The New Yorker in February 2022. “You know, it’s a television product, done with [And Just Like That creator] Michael Patrick King and Sarah Jessica Parker, who have both worked with HBO a lot in the past. HBO decided to put this franchise back into their hands for a variety of reasons, and this is what they came up with. I mean, Carrie Bradshaw ended up being a quirky woman who married a really rich guy. And that’s not my story, or any of my friends’ stories. But TV has its own logic.”
Bushnell has since warmed up more to the show after it was renewed for a second — and third — season.
“I’m really enjoying this season,” she exclusively told Us Weekly in July 2023. “I think they had some kinks that they had to work out. It had been a long time, obviously, since the original Sex in the City ended.I’m invested in the characters. I always want to see what’s going to happen. I love the new characters.”
At the time, Bushnell reflected on the ongoing interest in the core characters from SATC, adding, “I love the fact that other people are so invested in the show and that they really wanna discuss it. I think that’s fantastic.”
