“Sequels pay more.” – from the Holy Scriptures of High School Musical by Saint Sharpay Evans.

And pay more they did.

Neither me nor my sister were High School Musical fans growing up. Don’t get me wrong though, we loved Disney Channel Original movies like Twitches (2005), Johnny Tsunami (1999) and Halloweentown (1998).

There was actually a certain kind of magic to those made-for-TV movies. They had staggeringly low budgets and more often than not pretty poor acting. But their distinct lo-fi quality made them super cosy and whenever they would show up on the Disney Channel or Disney XD, we had to watch them. The old reliable made-for-TV trash.

With the advent of streaming however, made-for-TV movies are all but dead, replaced now with the Disney+ Original. The sentiment is there, but it isn’t the same. These movies are too polished, pristine and patronising.

I’m aware High School Musical is hallowed ground. I know I will be called a miserable codger for what I’m about to say. But please, Wildcats, listen to my plea with open hearts and ears.

Streaming didn’t kill the Disney Channel Original. High School Musical 3 did.

High School Musical was a phenomenon in the early 2000s. It moulded an entire generation’s expectations of what the high school experience was meant to be and the trials and tribulations that you would face. Hell, even in my home country of Cyprus.

It got so big that Disney felt confident enough to give it the third instalment a theatrical release and a bigger budget. It was the first Disney Channel Original to break off from the confines of the TV screen and to perform on the big stage. Its budget was $30m. It made back $253m.

And boy, can you tell, the opening number ‘Now or Never’ is loud, bombastic, an extravagant display of improved choreography, better vocal coaches and just a different energy. It’s actually a great musical number.

However, in my opinion, the movie nosedives off a cliff the second this musical number is up.

Because High School Musical 3 is a nauseating, hair pulling, 2 HOURS LONG.

Rewatching it for the first time in over a decade for this review was an agonising experience because the damn thing would not end. It just kept going and going and going.

The two-hour runtime wouldn’t be that much of an issue if the whole thing wasn’t the most meandering mess imaginable.

For starters, musical numbers are constantly reprised. This is fine if it’s done maybe once or twice, but HSM3 has the absolute gall to have its climactic performance at the end of the film be a reprise of every song you have already heard in the movie. Granted, some of these numbers are performed by different characters, but it gives off a sense as though they really didn’t know how to conclude the story and the arcs these characters go on. And at the very end, just to add extra insult, the movie feels the need to reprise a musical number from TWO WHOLE MOVIES AGO.

This laziness does not just extend to the musical numbers. Drama is just fabricated out of thin air and then resolved quicker than you have the opportunity to process it. Troy’s arc this entire movie is deciding whether he wants to go to a sports university in Albuquerque, or to take up the potential offer of studying drama at Julliard. You sprinkle in the potential dissolution of his romance with Gabriella, and you make for a pretty typical ‘final movie in a trilogy’ arc.

The aforementioned problem however is that these problems never linger. It never feels like there’s a real choice being made here, as everything is magically resolved within a handful of minutes after these problems have been introduced in these characters' lives.

Before anyone complains, yes, I get this is a Disney movie. But once again, this isn’t a made-for-TV Disney movie, this was a theatrical release. Having this movie actively contend with Disney films with real pathos and ethos feels so misguided and it’s really hard to not see the pure corporate cynicism in having a movie with such little effort put into it blasted onto the big screen.

The less said about the supporting characters the better. No one, apart from Troy and Gabriella, undergo anything even resembling an arc. Chad and Taylor are non-entities for the entire movie, save for the occasional musical number here and there. Shockingly, Sharpay and Ryan also undergo no transformation or arc that would have helped bring these characters to a close. Everything just ends exactly as it began.

Fundamentally, High School Musical 3 is just an extended TV movie that played on the big screen, and its extra bells and whistles might make for a more appealing package, but they also detract from the cosiness of the first two, lower budgeted TV films.

For anyone thinking I’m punching down, I’m not. This is a film screened in theatres that made hundreds of millions of dollars. It solidified High School Musical as a premium Disney franchise and helped embed its roots into Gen Z culture.

The reality of what this film created however, is far more sinister. Some readers might be too young to remember when Disney Channel Originals had some teeth to them. Tru Confessions (2002) may have aged badly, but its depiction of a neurodivergent teenager was boundary pushing at the time for Disney. Likewise, even Johnny Tsunami (1999) was effective in showing the effects of cultural displacement.

These films never got theatrical releases or sequels. In the end, the dollar signs won.

Made-for-TV movies get a bad rep. They are synonymous with lowest common denominator storytelling and filmmaking. Yes, many of them aren’t great. But their slapdash quality had a strangeness to them, a riskiness in their approach to storytelling and if anything banked on the possibility that they might never be seen again and took advantage of that. This aura, this energy is now completely dead.

High School Musical 3, to me, has come to define the kind of low effort product that is so emblematic of films made for streaming services. It showed that made-for-TV movies could stand fiscally on par with theatrical releases but also exemplified that effort was not required to match its grandeur of storytelling or characters.

This movie is a safety net, one that would not be nearly so egregious if it was a made-for-TV movie. But in the end, the bank account won out. And it makes me so confused. So bad I’m gonna scream.