Another Cinderella Story (2008)

Another Cinderella Story arrives from 2008 as the second entry in a franchise that treats the glass slipper as a consumer electronics problem. The slipper is a Zune. The prince is a pop star named Joey Parker who has returned to high school for his senior year, which is the sort of decision that only makes sense in a movie where the ball is a Valentine's Day dance and the wicked stepmother is a washed-up singer named Dominique Blatt. Damon Santostefano directs with the efficiency of a television movie, because that is what this is, and the machinery of the fairy tale turns over without complaint.

The cast offers Selena Gomez as Mary Santiago, a Latina lead in a mainstream teen musical, supported by Black performers in Jessica Parker Kennedy and Marcus T. Paulk. This is diversity by arithmetic, present on screen and absent from the script. Race is never mentioned, never grazed, never allowed to mean anything. The Cinderella frame puts a young woman at the center of her own story, which earns a token nod, though the resolution hands her to a male pop star and a recording contract, the traditional exchange executed without a flicker of self-awareness.

Beyond that, the cupboard is bare. No queer characters, no climate anxiety, no reckoning with the music industry's economics even as the film lingers in its backstage corridors. No body positivity, no neurodivergence, no revisionist history, no sermon. The film wants only to be a light musical with catchy numbers and a wheelchair joke at the villain's expense, and it succeeds on those modest terms. A document of its moment, and barely that.