‘High School Musical’ Gang Talks Sequel Pressure, East High’s New Class Before Starting ‘Senior Year’.

It’s a sequel to two of the most successful cable movies of all time — a one-off that became a franchise that became a veritable license to print money for Disney and stars like Zac Efron, Ashley Tisdale and Vanessa Hudgens. So now that “High School Musical” is making its first trip to the big screen with the series’ third installment, the talent behind the toe-tapping tale must be feeling the pressure to succeed big time, right?

“We’re not,” star Monique Coleman casually told reporters during a recent press conference the day before filming began on “High School Musical 3: Senior Year.” “We’re making another movie. I know, personally, I’m not going in there tempted to do it better, but just to do it justice.”

“It’s hard to look at it as a pressure, because we’ve been looking forward to this for so long,” Efron echoed. “We’re not looking to top anything.”

The stated desire to just keep on trucking is an unfamiliar refrain for any follow-up, let alone one that’s spawned so much. But, then, what’s made “HSM” a success in the first place has always been its utter lack of pretense, insisted Hudgens, who said the story for the next installment will follow a similarly accessible theme.

“The characters you see are a little over-the-top and stuff, [but] they’re people that go to high school,” she said of the continuing adventures of Sharpay, Troy and Gabriella. “Like, you have the brainiac who is in charge of the clubs and everything, you have the new girl who comes to school, and you have the jock. [But] they’re all real characters that you know and see in high school.”

But whereas the first two films dealt with adolescent love and angst, Efron confessed that this film deals with love and angst of a different kind — an adult kind…. Continue Reading