This past weekend was a perfect storm of action for young people ranging in age from as young as six or seven all the way up through age twenty four. Last Friday night, August 17, will most likely be confirmed today or tomorrow as one of historic proportions for the Disney Channel as well as all of basic cable. Early reports have the premiere of High School Musical 2 drawing some 17.2 million viewers, which would make it the most watched television show or movie in the history of basic cable. Not a bad way to start off the week for the folks over at Disney. Luckily, I was able to see firsthand how members of the tween and young teen audience were acting in anticipation of the premiere. I think it was brilliant ploy by Disney to feature the countdown clock to the premiere, it only got your viewers even more excited. What's more, I think it is more than fair to say that there were quite a few "viewing parties" taking place this past Friday, I politely and stealthy crashed one of the them. Now that it is over, it's always about what's next with this audience. If you saw (or heard) the reactions of some of the tweenie boppers faces when I told them that the next time they saw a High School Musical movie (the third iteration) it would be on the big screen, well, all I can say is, my hearing is almost back to normal, but not quite there yet. If that's any indication of what's to come for Disney, we should expect the billion dollar franchise to grow into a multi-billion dollar franchise. Switching gears to the teen and college aged segment...Give it up for Sony's opening weekend performance of Superbad, who boldly jumped over Rush Hour 3 and Bourne Ultimatum to secure top spot of the box office. Seriously, it is any surprise who drives July and August theater visits? In the spirit of Borat, Superbad was made relatively inexpensively, and will most likely turn out to be extraordinarily profitable for Sony-owned Columbia Pictures. It's really a winning formula with a few twists here and there...a couple of hormone crazed high school guys on the prowl for alcohol and girls, not necessarily in the that order...
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