Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Samantha Song | Film | August 18, 2026
There is something deeply suspicious about Camp Rock 3. Not bad, exactly. Just the kind of movie that keeps leaning over and whispering, “Remember this?” until you start wondering whether it has any new information.
The setup is simple enough. Camp Rock is still alive, somehow, despite the music industry having changed roughly 400 times since anyone last cared about Final Jam. Connect 3 needs an opening act, a new crop of campers arrives to compete for the slot, and Disney immediately begins rummaging through the franchise attic for anything that might make a person born before 2005 point at the television.
OK fine. I remember. I remember Mitchie, Shane, (who, apparently, were not allowed to be endgame, a decision I have chosen to take personally) Tess, the scarves, the choreography, the completely deranged seriousness with which everyone once treated a summer-camp talent show. I remember enough that when Mitchie’s old songbook appears like a sacred relic, I laughed—and also briefly considered whether Disney was trying to kill me personally.
The new campers are likable enough, which is unfortunately also the problem. Sage and Fletch meet, flirt, develop feelings, run into conflict, and resolve that conflict so quickly that their relationship feels less like a romance and more like a loading browser tab. Nearly every disagreement disappears before it has time to become interesting, which leaves the movie with the strange sensation of constantly setting up drama and then politely escorting it out of the building.
Then there is Maddie, our villain … allegedly. Tess Tyler was awful, but she was awful with commitment; Maddie feels like someone asked for “Tess, but influencer,” then got distracted halfway through writing her. She rarely feels dangerous, funny, or even particularly necessary, which is a problem when you are filling the role previously occupied by a girl who treated stealing someone’s spotlight at summer camp like a hostile corporate takeover.
The music is maybe where Camp Rock 3 feels cheapest, because half the soundtrack seems to be built from the bones of songs Disney already knows we like. Instead of giving the new campers music strong enough to justify resurrecting this franchise, the movie keeps reaching for reprises, callbacks, and reworked versions of the originals, as though “remember this melody?” counts as songwriting. At a certain point, you start wondering whether this was nostalgia as a creative choice or whether nobody had the budget to commission an entirely new soundtrack. And the problem with constantly dragging the old music back into the room is that it invites comparison, which is incredibly unhelpful when the new songs already sound like they were written to resemble Camp Rock rather than become part of it.
More strangely, Camp Rock 3 somehow still contains surprisingly little actual Camp Rock. Everything revolves around winning the Connect 3 opening slot, so the cabins, friendships, random camp activities, and general “teenagers discovering themselves in the woods through the power of pop-rock” atmosphere barely get room to breathe. You could move this exact story to a performing arts school or the back room of a suburban Guitar Center and very little would change, which is a worrying thing to say about a movie with CAMP in the title.
Rosie is probably the clearest example of the better movie hiding inside this one. She starts shy, tucked behind a cello, then suddenly emerges at Final Jam as if someone hit “unlock character development,” and I desperately wanted to see more of the awkward middle where that transformation actually happened. That is the kind of story Camp Rock used to be good at: kids arriving with one idea of themselves and leaving with a louder, more embarrassing, more sincere one. Here, the movie is so busy racing toward the next callback that it occasionally forgets to let its new characters earn the moments it clearly wants us to care about.
And still, against my better judgment, some reptilian Disney Channel part of my brain keeps lighting up. Fine. I remember. I remember “We Rock.” I remember Shane as a musical bloodhound wandering around trying to identify a girl by voice. I remember Tess acting like Camp Rock controlled the Dow Jones. I remember all of it.
And that girl at the end?
She’s really good.
Goddammit.
