Kim Cattrall has done us all a favour by putting a stop to SATC3

'I take to task the people from Sex And The City and specifically Sarah Jessica Parker in that I think she could have been nicer'

Kim Cattrall has found herself the target of an online hate storm this week for her rumoured reluctance to return as Samantha Jones in Sex And The City 3.

The other SATC cast members were said to have been keen on the idea of a third movie and both Kristin Davis and Sarah Jessica Parker have openly expressed their disappointment that the film has been spiked. It is deeply frustrating not to able to share [a new chapter] with all of you' Kristin Davis wrote to her Instagram followers.

Cattrall, meanwhile, has been surprised to find herself blamed for the film's failure to launch. 'Woke 2 a @MailOnline [shit] storm!' she wrote on Twitter after claims that her diva-ish demands had destroyed hopes of a third movie, 'The only "DEMAND" I ever made was that I didn't want to do a 3rd film.... & that was back in 2016.'

According to an audience member who was present at Cattrall's Piers Morgan interview taping on Monday night, Cattrall is said to be stung by the scapegoating. 'I take to task the people from Sex And The City' she is quoted as saying, 'and specifically Sarah Jessica Parker in that I think she could have been nicer.'

But surely the surprise news here is not that Kim Cattrall wasn't keen on a third movie, but that the rest of the SATC team were.

Sex And The City was a rich, whip-smart jewel of a show that combined the fun of pre-recession New York with hard boiled observations of life as a 30-something Manhattanite. But the films that followed in 2008 and 2010 were strange, bloated affairs that swapped sharp dialogue for slapstick humour and moronic cooing over piles of shoes.

In the widely panned Sex And The City 2, we saw the foursome decamp to Abu Dhabi, apparently to tick off as many culturally insensitive scenarios as possible in a 2 hour 27 minute time frame. This included a scene near the end of the movie which saw Samantha (Kim Cattrall) standing in a bazaar screaming, 'I love sex!' at a crowd of men.

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Arguably, Cattrall's character Samantha Jones had the roughest ride in the franchise's big screen transition. The final series of Sex And The City saw her supremely confident character at her most vulnerable - battling breast cancer and overcoming her commitment phobia to form a genuine bond with her boyfriend Smith. But in the movies all that nuance was blown away and Samantha became almost pitiably cartoonish, making crude, clunky jokes that didn't have the same sparkle as TV show Samantha.

To her credit, Sarah Jessica Parker has acknowledged that Sex And The City 2 was a turkey. 'I understand, I actually get it', she told New York Magazine's editor-in-chief at a live event earlier this year, 'I can see where we fell short on that movie, and I’m perfectly happy to say that publicly.' It's also quite possible that she and Michael Patrick King have learned from their mistakes and a third movie could bring the old magic back.

But it's also been seven years since the last SATC movie was made. You can't blame 61-year-old Cattrall - who has forged a successful post-Samantha stage and screen career - for wanting to leave the old sex maniac PR executive behind her. And besides, aren't all the best stories being made on TV now anyway?