Film and Digital Media @ Messiah

All the world’s a-twitter: will the writer’s strike force production of High School Musical 3 and The Hannah Montana Movie to be postponed?

Read it … and weep! Oh the humanity!

Jim Hill (an animation production expert who specializes in Disney) shares the grim news coming out of Burbank: unless the WGA returns to work early in 2008 — Walt Disney Pictures may have no choice but to push back production of the big screen versions of these two Disney Channel favorites.

Disney Pictures was really looking forward to putting High School Musical 3 and The Hannah Montana Movie out in theaters. Why? Well, mostly because the combined production costs of these two motion pictures will still be less than half of what Disney is spending to make The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian.

But gosh darn (as Mickey would say), a Mouse House insider tells Hill:
“These two were supposed to be our cash cows for 2008. We hoped to sell movie tickets to every tween in America, get them to download those soundtracks off of iTunes and then — three months later — get them to buy the High School Musical 3 and Hannah Montana Movie DVDs. But none of that’s going to happen next year if we have to put off production because those scripts aren’t in good enough shape to shoot.”

Hill writes “Disney doesn’t want to push back production of High School Musical 3 or The Hannah Montana Movie. They know how fickle the tween audience is. How even postponing the release of these two movies by just a few months may result in Mickey’s target audience losing interest. Moving on to the next big thing. Which is why preproduction on HSM3 and THMM is going forward … For now, anyway.”