At Variety, Clifford Coonan reports that Disney and Huayi Brothers are partnering to produce a mainland version of the smash hit High School Musical:
Reed said there were some similarities with the original "High School Musical," "but we wrote an original screenplay from the ground up. This is inspired by the spirit of the first one."
The localization process threw up some interesting developments -- when the Disney treatment swapped basketball for kung fu training in the school, the local Chinese pointed out that basketball was a much bigger deal in China's schools than kung fu. The basketball stayed, Reed said. "We made it more local by making it more American," he added.
Cfensi has some comments on casting:
Hua Yi president, Wang Zhonglei was at the production start ceremony held on Nov. 22nd. He said that despite the lack of many successful musicals in China (poor Le Huo Nan Hai!), he expects this to have a big box office when it arrives in theaters next summer. Usually I have more faith in his statements, because Hua Yi’s well managed and their success rate is high, but the casting of Zhang Junning perplexes me, and brings me even more apprehension than just the baseline idea of “Chinese HSM remake”. He’s hot, and can sing and dance pretty decently, but less charismatic of actor than either Zac Efron or Jing Boran from BOBO. Maybe charisma wasn’t necessary for the character?
The Disney press release is here.