Will The Irony Multiplier Hurt 'High School Musical 3'?

The Irony Multiplier: How much would you pay to make fun of Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens? Fred Hayes/Disney Enterprises

 

by Linda Holmes

I haven't yet seen High School Musical 3: Senior Year, which opens today to the squealing excitement of people who may be inside your own home. Not because I'm abstaining, but because I already have an appointment to see it with a friend next weekend. I fully expect it to be atrocious by any objective artistic standard.

You probably know the story of the first two High School Musical movies that aired on the Disney Channel: a low-budget project, a cult following, iTunes downloads, huge dollars, total bafflement, a second movie, more huge dollars, more merchandise, more bafflement, a jump to theaters.

What has helped High School Musical make so much money? The attractiveness of the actors doesn't hurt, and neither do the infectiously toe-tappable tunes from the first movie in particular.

But I'm convinced that HSM has also benefited from something I'm going to call the Irony Multiplier.

What the Irony Multiplier is, and where it shows up, after the jump...

I learned about the Irony Multiplier at two movies I attended earlier this year with a bunch of friends: Step Up 2: The Streets (a horrible film about competitive "street dancing") and Never Back Down (a horrible film about bloody fistfights among high-school students, which I actually had to look up online, because my mind had christened it Step Up 2: Ultimate Fighting).

I openly admit that my friends and I went to both of these movies expecting to laugh hysterically at their awfulness (we did), and I was surprised to find that a good portion of the other people in both theaters were there for the same reason.

But whether we went because the movies were entertainingly terrible or because they were good, we paid up. Some "bad" entertainment that is bad in the right way has an Irony Multiplier: an amount by which its profits are multiplied because of masochistic yahoos such as myself who enjoy consuming something hysterically wretched in the perfect social setting. Studios surely don't care whether you pay to "enjoy" the movie earnestly or sarcastically.

I firmly believe that Step Up 2: The Streets and Never Back Down each had Irony Multipliers of about 2.0, at least in the theaters I was in -- in other words, half the audience for each showed up to make fun of the melodramatic line readings.

I (unscientifically) estimate that High School Musical, as a franchise, has an Irony Multiplier of about 3.0. There is a certain audience -- mostly under about thirteen -- that actually believes these are good movies. But I think there are at least twice as many people who consider them "guilty pleasures" or "enjoyable trash" or something similar, who would never defend the merit but enjoy the spectacle. Even among teenagers, it's a big group. This is undoubtedly why the sing-along and dance-along versions of the movie were popular. I don't envision earnest sing-alongs, but goofy sing-alongs. Bad karaoke, done on purpose.

So the question is: what part of this Audience Of The Ashamed will actually pony up money to see a High School Musical movie in theaters? Sure, I went to see the dancing movie and the fighting movie, but I am not typical. I have a high tolerance for things I will only make fun of later. I saw License To Wed.

Maybe the movie will be a hit, but if it's not, it may be because an Irony Multiplier of 3.0 is simply too high for theaters -- people who will happily sit at home and watch something terrible on cable may not part with cash to see it. Furthermore, in a down economy, isn't it predictable that bad things will be one of the first things you sacrifice? There is so much terrible entertainment that can be yours free of charge; why make fun of something expensive?