You might have thought that High School Musical 3 was to be the swansong of the series, leaving tweens everywhere with three near-identical Grease rip-offs to cling onto.

But that’s not the case at all. Eager to keep churning out enough High School Musicals to keep everyone in solid gold bathtubs for a decade, Disney has announced that there’s a High School Musical 4 in the pipeline.

However, don’t expect too many of your favourite High School Musical characters in High School Musical 4, because rumour has it that there’ll be a mostly-new cast. Which we’re eternally thankful to Disney for – after all, the High School Musical cast of today is the middle-aged pervert’s grubby naked sex fantasy object of tomorrow.

The High School Musical movies might look like an awful lot of fun – all cartwheeling down corridors and making best friends forever with an appropriately racially-diverse group of bright-eyed youngsters – but the reality couldn’t be further removed.

Churning out one High School Musical movie after another is hard work on everyone. The songwriters must be running out of ideas by now – surely there are only so many ways to put across the sentiment that everyone is in everything together and also special and flying and stuff – and the High School Musical cast is now so old and clearly un-high school that some of their internal organs are starting to pop.

So the High School Musical franchise should clearly be put out to pasture, right? Oh yeah, and let that bitch Miley Cyrus scoop up all the tween pocket money? NEVER!

So that’s why Disney has announced High School Musical 4, even though High School Musical 3 hasn’t even been released yet. Excited? Don’t be – High School Musical 4 is going to be the disappointing S Club Juniors of the wholesome tween movie world, as Reuters reports:

“We are writing ‘High School Musical 4,’ ” Disney Channel Worldwide president Rich Ross said Tuesday after a presentation at a midtown Manhattan recording studio. It’s likely to be a TV movie unlike “High School Musical 3: Senior Year,” though that could change. Filming begins in two weeks in Utah. There’s no word on whether the cast and behind-the-scenes talent will gather again for “HSM4,” though some characters introduced in the third go-round likely will star in the fourth. “Are we going to have all the cast back? Probably not,” Ross said. “Will we have some of them? I hope so.”

Really? Some of the High School Musical cast will be back for the fourth movie? But they’re all too old to believably be high school students any more. So, while we can see that Zac Efron will want to leave High School Musical to pursue his movie career – and Vanessa Hudgens will want to get cracking on her late-night cable erotic thriller career before everyone gets sick of staring at her naked body – the others will stay. But how? Here are a few ideas.

1 - Bizarrely, all the graduating High School Musical students decide to immediately return to school to work as teachers, even though they have no qualifications and are so highly unsuitable that their appointments defy all sense of logic. This is the Saved By The Bell: The New Class option.

2 – The entire High School Musical cast is put back to junior high because they’ve all legally found to be dangerously stupid. Not only will this keep some familiar faces in High School Musical 4, but it’ll also mean we’ll get to see songs like 22 (And Still Can’t Spell My Own Name), I Think I Just Shat Myself and the 12-minute centrepiece Exploratory Adolescent Odyssey, which just consists of some monotone gurgling and the sound of one boy sobbing because he ate an orange crayola thinking it was a carrot.

3 - Everyone from the first three High School Musical movies realises that they’re already moments away from being so typecast as a grinning earnest teenager that they’ll never ever find work again if they see High School Musical 4 through, so they have it written into their contract that a disturbed student in a leather trenchcoat bursts into their classroom in the first couple of minutes and massacres them all indiscriminately with a selection of his father’s rifles.

Which option will Disney go for? So long as the decision forces our local Disney store to reduce the price of its Vanessa Hudgens High School Musical figures enough for us to buy them all and sit around stroking their hair and whispering into their ears and pretending we have 150 identical tiny plastic naked slutty girlfriends, then we’ll happily go along with anything.

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“High School Musical 4″ already in works – Reuters