Looking up to Cyrus

What happened

Disney’s Hannah Montana concert film dominated online ticket sales before its weekend opening. Fandango.com and MovieTickets.com, the top online ticket sellers, said Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert accounted for more than three-quarters of their sales early this week. The 3-D movie stars Miley Cyrus, the 15-year-old who stars in the wildly popular Hannah Montana TV series about an ordinary high school student who lives a double-life as a rock star. (Reuters in The Hollywood Reporter)

What the commentators said

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The question is not whether this film will be huge, said Joshua Rich in EW.com, but how huge. There are “a gazillion young ladies” out there dying to see this movie. It’s only opening in 683 theaters on its opening weekend, and it has “one of the most ridiculous titles in the history of cinema.” But this “tween-oriented concert flick, featuring one of the most popular entertainers around,” could rule the box office.

If you’re going, expect to share the theater with throngs of “ecstatic little girls,” said Peter Debruge in Variety. It will be a scene, and “it's all engineered as part of the Miley Cyrus mythmaking effort, reinforcing the classic Disney dream that anyone can become the studio's next pop sensation.” But “unlike ex-Mouseketeers-gone-bad Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, Cyrus still projects a chaste, wholesome image of teenage fun, and she performs without all the trampy, sexualized theatrics, making her a less toxic role model for all those screaming tweens.”

These aren’t the wails parents will remember from Beatles concerts, said Jan Stuart in Newsday, when the Fab Four sent “girls into weepy hormonal overdrive.” When tweens yell for Hannah and Miley, “they are squealing for themselves,” inspired by the singers messages about “staying positive” and “letting the boys know who’s in control.” If you’re a parent lucky enough to score tickets for your kids on the film’s opening weekend, expect to be won over by the star’s “goofball vitality.” Just don’t count on becoming a fan of the “fizzy, forgettable paeans to the joys of being ‘an ordinary girl in an extraordinary world.’”