Okay, so we're not saying we'd want to see a movie this way every week, but we gotta say our weekend viewing of High School Musical 3: Senior Year was worth it if only for the glorious spectacle of it all. The Disney Channel's third HSM installment took in nearly 82 million dollars worldwide -- the biggest global success since The Dark Knight. Disney has to be thanking their lucky stars these zany singing, dancing kids are so likable.
Here's some highlights from our experience...
First of all, it goes without saying that we were in the big theater (the one with the balcony), the line to get in was so long that it was in four sections, and woe betide anyone who should accidentally step into the wrong part of the labyrinth. Everytime we thought we found the end, some mother of three was waving angrily at us from another part of the hallway and yelling, "Hey, the line end's back HERE!" One kid spilled his popcorn in excitement before we actually got into the theater, and the sing-a-long began long before the doors opened. At one point, a twenty-ish girl in front of us turned around and said, "Do you think these kids are going to be singing during the movie?" which kind of made us wonder if she knew what she was getting herself into.
We feel like we should point out that while the 5-13 year olds were certainly the loudest and most enthusiastic age group in attendance, they were not the largest. That honor belongs to the 18-25 contingent. The most amusing age-group by far was the late-twenties-early-thirty-somethings that shuffled in the spilled popcorn, cleared their throats and talked about the election to distract themselves from the fact that they were voluntarily standing in a mile-long line sans children to see high school kids break into song in the cafeteria.
We weren't bothered by it. We even smuggled some tacos into the theater in our backpack so it really would be just like high school. A couple of things we tallied on our knee with a sharpie:
Number of homemade HSM t-shirts: 5
Number of times the audience broke into audible singing: 7
Number of kids we saw clutching either the DVD of one of the previous HSM movies or the soundtrack CD: 4 (Why? What are they going to do with those in a movie theater?)
Number of times Zac Efron's appearance on screen elicited spontaneous applause: 8
