May 2010 release date set for “Sex and the City 2”

I cannot wait for the return of Carrie, Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte. My only problem is they won’t be back in the theaters until May 28, 2o1o – that’s more than a year away and Greg In Hollywood misses his girls!

Warner Bros. and New Line announced the release date of  Sex and the City 2 on Thursday. The date will be the same weekend the first Sex and the City movie opened last year. A sequel was a no-brainer after the movie had a $57 million opening weekend and went on to earn $152.6 million at the domestic box office. Then  there was the foreign gross which added up to $260 million for a worldwide total of $412.6 million.

With that kind of money being earned – and we’re not even talking pay-per-view and DVDs – star and producer Sarah Jessica Parker will be getting a hefty payday. And thanks to the hard bargaining of Kim Cattrall, she, Cynthia Nixon and Kristin Davis will also probably be getting the biggest checks of their careers.

While Parker has has appeared in several other films including the box office hit Failure to Launch and the well-regarded The Family Stone, it is Nixon who has had the most artistic success outside of Sex. Now in a committed lesbian relationship, the actress won an Emmy (her second) last year for an appearance on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and a year earlier, won the Tony Award for best actress in a play for Rabbit Hole. She was also Emmy nominated for her performance as Eleanor Franklin in the HBO miniseries Warm Springs. Then in February, she won a Grammy for best spoken word album for reading An Inconvenient Truth with Beau Bridges and Blair Underwood. All she needs now is an Oscar!

I was very fortunate to do a face-to-face interview with Miss Nixon last fall and asked about the phenomenon of Sex and the City which enjoyed a six year run on HBO before segueing into the occasional movie.

“I have to say, the four of us, we love our characters so much,” she said. “It’s very rare to leave a role, particularly a role that was so precious to you and get a chance to revisit it years later in an even bigger way. You have it on TV then you get to do it in the movies. Very few people get that chance.”

I asked Cynthia if it was easier to return to Miranda after earning acclaim for so many other roles. She said: coming off of Sex and the City, when people identify you so strongly with that one role, it’s nice to be recognized for other roles and particularly a role like that (on SVU) was so transformative. Not just one role but five roles in one and really a chance to show, ‘Hey, I’m not just Miranda, I can do all these other things.’