As I posted last week, the trailer for High School Musical 3: Senior Year was scheduled to hit Disney yesterday, and it did. You can check it out big or small and shnazzy over at Disney.com, but since it's location-locked, I'm including the YouTube video of the premiere after the jump -- and make sure you head on over to Moviefone to see their exclusive photos (including the one above) from the film.

Now it's mostly what you'd figure -- the perfect-looking kids singing pop songs while dealing with the woes of big-screen high school. In this case, it's basketball and lots of romance, but there's also some Footloose flavor in there. Well, that's what I'm assuming since the trailer shows some clips of Zac Efron dancing about in a plaid shirt and a white tee in an industrial yard. But seeing that he takes that look into the classroom -- is plaid back in style?!

The kids finally get to graduate this October 24.

Okay, Will Ferrell has nothing to do with the following production news, but when I think male cheerleaders, I think 'Spartans' -- so sue me. While Ferrell is hardly the most dignified symbol of male cheerleaders everywhere, it's not like a Disney dance comedy is going to do much to raise their profile either. Variety reports that Adam Shankman (the musical producer extraordinaire and part-time judge on So You Think You Can Dance) has signed with Disney to produce the male cheerleader comedy, Matadors.

The pitch was written by Mike Bender (Not Another Teen Movie) and is based on the true story of the all-male dance group that performs at home games for The Chicago Bulls. Never heard of them? Don't feel bad, neither had I. But then again, my cheerleader knowledge is limited to what I've learned from watching Bring it On.

Former Laker Girl Anne Fletcher has already signed to direct; Fletcher also worked with Shankman as a choreographer on the dance flick Step-Up back in 2006. According to Variety, the film will primarily be a comedy, but it "will feature extensive dance numbers, drawing on Fletcher's experience as a choreographer." Matadors has not started casting yet, but Fletcher told The Hollywood Reporter, "It's an array of guys, with all sorts of shapes and sizes. We'll be able to have fun with the casting." Well, what do you know? Maybe there's a part for Ferrell in Matadors after all.

Who would you like to see shaking their pom poms for Shankman and company? Sound off below ...

Sorry, High School Musical fans -- the trailer isn't attached to this post, but I can tell you when you can lay your eyes on the singing school extravaganza.

Coming Soon has thrown up a Disney press release for High School Musical 3: Senior Year. You won't have to go see some random movie to get a peek. Instead, you just have to lean back and relax in front of your television. The first look at the trailer will air on July 13, at 7:55 P.M. ET/PT, preceding an encore of Camp Rock. (Note: A bunch of other countries with Disney will get this as well -- Canada, Japan, UK, Australia, etc.) And there won't be a long wait before it hits the net -- Disney.com will start showing it 12:01 A.M. ET.

Oh, but there's more! Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens will host the trailer, and include the song "Now or Never," which will be up on Radio Disney tomorrow.

And for those of you who groan at this news: beware! The teenyboppers will descend upon movie theaters to see this puppy on October 24.

Before we get started, I just want to make it clear that in Hollywood nothing is ever official until you see the press release (and you should probably take the following news with a big grain of salt). Over at the Alice in Wonderland fan site, talk has surfaced that Tim Burton has finally cast Alice in his live-action version of Alice in Wonderland (not to be confused with the long-suffering American McGee creation).

According to the commenter, Ian B: "My brother is working on the movie and he said Alice has been cast. He is a music supervisor for the movie and said there will be a press release about it on July 9th. The role was originally supposed to be Evan Rachel Woods but she backed out. Alice won't be played by a child but a 23 year old. From what I was told it's her first Burton movie, and her first big role in a film that will be released world wide." So who's the lucky gal? Say hello to Ryan Nikole Parker. Parker is not very well known, and other than a few TV credits is a relative newcomer to the business.

Burton struck the deal for Alice with Disney back in November, and according to comments on the IMDB message boards, he's already finished casting. Luckily for us, July 9th isn't that far away, so we won't be waiting long for the official word.

Sound off below on who you would like to see go down the rabbit hole with Mr. Burton.

[via The Bad and Ugly]

This one's a little heartwarming, folks, especially if you're predisposed (as I am) to admiring pretty much everything about the Pixar company.

Last fall, a young woman named Courtney saw the WALL-E teaser -- the one where Andrew Stanton talks about the meeting in 1994 where the story was first conceived -- and was reduced to a puddle of tears by its adorableness. Seems she has a soft spot for robots, and in particular for lonely, child-like, wide-eyed robots. So she videoed herself watching the trailer on her computer, knowing it would have the same effect on her again, and then she posted the video on her blog and on YouTube. (We've got it here after the jump.)

The video made its way around the Internets, as these things do, and Courtney began to get e-mails from people within the Pixar family who had seen it and appreciated her enthusiasm. Then one of the film's producers sent her a Pixar jacket as a Christmas gift, along with a note thanking her for the video.

And then they invited her to the film's wrap party in San Francisco.

The media is playing two pointless games of "gotcha" with Pixar's wonderful Wall-E at the moment. Eric Kohn addressed the first -- conservative critics griping about the film's "left-wing" message -- over here. The other, best articulated in this post by CHUD's Devin Faraci and this mind-boggling missive from the New York Post's Kyle Smith, but also showing up in Todd McCarthy's Variety review, is that Wall-E's supposed anti-consumerist bent is "hypocrisy" on account of it's released by Disney. I think that's a stupid and dishonest argument, and here's why.

In its latter half, Wall-E presents a vision of the future in which humanity is fat, lazy, basically immobile but for their hoverchairs, and in thrall to a mega-corporation called Buy 'N Large that tells everyone what to do, what to think, and what to buy. The rest of the film is dedicated to Wall-E, EVE, and the spaceship Axiom's human population defying the corporation and returning back to Earth to recolonize. This is disingenuous, the thinking goes, because the Disney empire bears more than a few similarities to Buy 'N Large and, in fact, cynically counts on unthinking, overweight masses, to see its movies, buy its merchandise, and ride the rides at Disney World.

What you'll notice from the folks making this argument is a coy ambiguity about who exactly is being hypocritical here. If the claim is that Disney is being hypocritical by releasing Wall-E, then that may well be right -- but it's also not surprising, newsworthy, or even worth mentioning. Is anyone really shocked that a large, profit-seeking corporation is being opportunistic and ideologically inconsistent? Where is all the outrage about Disney flicks that push the individuality and non-conformism message, when the Walt Disney Company is dependent on a herd mentality among its consumers?

" ... and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
He meets some fragments huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place."

-- Horace Smith, Ozymandias

WALL-E, from Pixar studios, shows us a ruined city, centuries from now, where a single (and singular) robot toils to cube trash and, it seems, will never lack for work. WALL-E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter (Earth-Class)), a two-treaded solitary worker robot, spends his days cubing trash and his nights shut in safe from the cataclysmic garbage-gales that sweep the planet, inside a repair truck he's filled with things that have fascinated him; garden gnomes, butane lighters, a copy of Hello, Dolly! And in WALL-E's nearly-silent opening minutes, we get a sense of the world he lives in. Everything is ruined; there are no signs of life but for cockroaches; the only voices you hear come when the motion-activated Buy 'n' Large holo-billboards go off. WALL-E strips his broken-down brethren for parts and recharges by the sun's rays and stacks trash-cubes to imitate the skyscrapers decaying all around him, garbage as a pale reflection of glory.

It's hundreds of years from now, practically no life (save for a cockroach) remains on the giant garbage dump that's become Earth, and, funnily enough, the only remaining sign of humanity can be found inside the planet's last functional robot: a trash collector (and compactor) named WALL·E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class). It's been roughly 700 years since humans last populated Earth, and in that time WALL·E has wasted away doing what he was originally programmed for: collect, compact and pile trash so that it's out of the way.

However, over the years WALL·E has managed to develop a bit of OCD, collecting certain items and methodically storing them in the large metal container he calls home. One day, while out searching for more trash (and knickknacks), a spaceship arrives to drop off another robot -- one whose mission it is to scour the area and search for life. And it's a girl ... named EVE (Extra-terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator).

Thus begins what is perhaps Pixar's most romantic film yet -- a beautiful sci-fi tale complete with all the feel-good vibes and fantastic, cutting-edge visuals we've come to expect from a film wearing the Pixar name. Despite a few small bumps in the galaxy, WALL·E can easily claim a spot up top on a list featuring the best films of the year so far, and it will surely go down as one of Pixar's most memorable -- because it's also one of their most personal.

Two weeks ago, we learned that Paul Newman has lung cancer (or may have lung cancer). And my first reaction was: will he still be able to do A Walk in the Woods with Robert Redford? Or whatever that long-ago confirmed final film is, if not that Bill Bryson adaptation? A couple years back the Oscar-winning actor said he's retiring after one "last hurrah," and it was speculated that he'd be re-teaming with Redford (his partner in both Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting). Unfortunately, the last we heard about A Walk in the Woods, there was no mention of Newman being involved.

Over at MTV Movies Blog, meanwhile, Shawn Adler's first thought was more like: "Is Cars really going to be his last acting role?" And thanks to MTV News, he somewhat received the answer. Apparently, the fine folks at Pixar (who are releasing their latest, Wall-E, this Friday) are including Newman's character, "Doc Hudson", in the script for Cars 2, which is set to hit theaters in 2012. Cars co-writer/director John Lasseter says they're "just waiting to see" if Newman will be able to reprise the role. If Newman can't do it, though, the sequel will be doubly sad, since it will also be missing Joe Ranft, who co-wrote, co-directed and voiced two characters in the first movie. The longtime Pixar collaborator died tragically in a car accident the year before Cars came out.

Would you still want Doc to appear in Cars 2 if not voiced by Newman?

In theory, those who write about film are supposed to enter a movie without any pre-conceived notions or bias and proceed to give it a fair shake. However, it becomes exceedingly difficult for one not to eye with suspicion the looming threat of a Raja Gosnell-helmed talking animal bonanza and consequently find their sense of reason rendered stone-cold ...

... which is why it pleases me to report that we as a society have staved off the likes of Beverly Hills Chihuahua for a whole week, as the Disney flick has officially been bumped back from September 26th to October 3rd. Just in case you good readers find this all a mite irrational, might I direct you toward Weinberg's deservedly righteous rant whilst I again praise the heavens for allowing us poor souls an additional seven days with which to gird our loins against the potential awfulness of this film.

In related news, the Richard Gere/Diane Lane romance Nights in Rodanthe has followed an inverse path, moving itself up from October 3rd to September 26th. If October informally qualifies as the month for horror, then thank goodness my Halloween is getting off to just as frightening a start as the prospect of sitting through a Nicholas Sparks adaptation.

[Mercy in the grand scheme of things courtesy of Box Office Mojo.]

After the whole Spike Lee vs. Clint Eastwood kerfuffle, it's great to finally see a glimpse of Lee's new World War II movie, Miracle at St. Anna. The trailer for the film has just shown up on Yahoo! and it looks just as great as I'd hoped it would. Of course, it's difficult to tell the quality of a war movie based on its trailer -- war movies from Hollywood typically all look the same at the marketing stage -- but I have a strong feeling this will at the very least be one of the more interesting war movies we've seen in some time. Coming from the unique perspective of Lee, we're hopefully bound for some things we haven't even seen before.

I like that the trailer begins in a bank that kinda resembles the one from Lee's previous feature, Inside Man. And that it takes a moment to reveal that it's a war movie. I guess now that we see Joseph Gordon-Levitt's role more clearly (he's not even listed on the film's IMDb page), it seems as though St. Anna may involve more of a present story than I had expected. Perhaps his interview with the main character, Hector (Laz Alonso), will be interwoven with the story, like the interrogation sequences of Inside Man? Nah, Lee would never repeat himself so blatantly, would he?

The Miracle of St. Anna marches into theaters September 26.

It seems most TV series can be watched online for free now, so why not also stream episodes of a program like ABC's Wonderful World of Disney? Sure each episode is actually a feature-length Disney-made film, but a TV show is a TV show. Fortunately, Disney seems to agree, as they're putting this summer's crop of WWoD films online for free. Typical of Disney, though, and unlike ABC.com's library of episodes, each film will only be available for a limited time. Basically, each title will screen on ABC on Saturday night, then it will be up on Disney.com (specifically the WWoD page) the following week, from Monday through Friday only. Currently, Finding Nemo, which appeared on WWoD June 7, is being offered.

Other movies on the schedule this summer include Monsters Inc., Freaky Friday, The Haunted Mansion, Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen and The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement. Peter Pan will be the last to air and then stream, during the first week of August. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the one movie making its world premiere on the program, Camp Rock, will also (or is it only?) stream for 24 hours on June 23, on a separate page, after airing a few times on ABC and ABC Family the weekend prior.