Will The Hollywood Writer’s Strike Deprive Us Of Future Doses Of Disney Tween Pop?

If you were a parent, a preteen, or a weirdo hangin’ by the movie fone for the big screen versions of High School Musical and Hannah Montana (and their attendant soundtracks) in 2008, keep waiting, because shoddy shooting scripts coupled with the WGA strike bleeding dry the pool of people who can punch those scripts up have left Disney in the franchise-fracturing position of possibly having to mothball both for the time being, thereby alienating “fickle” grade school fans and/or destroying what’s left of the music (and ice tour!) industry as we know it! Maybe?

“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.”

And let me be blunt here, folks: Disney doesn’t want to push back production of “High School Musical 3” or “The Hannah Montana Movie.” These folks 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.

Of course none of this means that Disney couldn’t continue on releasing HSM and Montana-related music, though the whole audio-visual synergy thing that made them inescapable would certainly be compromised by the lack of the “visual” part. (Zac Efron is known for his pipes, after all.) Might make for an interesting experiment to see just how many of those millions of units they could shift minus a crucial cross-marketing angle, relying on just the records alone. Yeah, that could work.

Will the writer’s strike force production of “High School Musical 3” & “The Hannah Montana Movie” to be postponed ? [Jim Hill Media via ONTD]