What Really Happened During Demi Lovato’s Dark Disney Days
The below has been excerpted from DISNEY HIGH: The Untold Story of the Rise and Fall of Disney Channel's Tween Empire by Ashley Spencer © 2024 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Press.
Demi Lovato’s Sonny With a Chance contract went beyond the standard series terms that many previous Disney Channel stars signed and more closely resembled something out of the old Hollywood studio system. It stipulated that, in addition to Demi’s commitment to Sonny with a Chance (at the time called Sketchpad), she would be required to do two post–Camp Rock Disney Channel Original Movies, as well as a theatrical Sonny film, if Disney pursued any of those options.
Demi was contracted to receive $38,750 for her performance in the first Camp Rock, $75,000 for Princess Protection Program, at least $100,000 for the Camp Rock sequel, and $10,000 per episode for Sonny’s first season with a 5 percent bump on the second season (the same series scale Selena was signed to on Wizards). If a Sonny theatrical movie were to come to fruition, she was locked into a $500,000 base for that picture (half of what Hilary Duff had been able to negotiate for The Lizzie McGuire Movie four years earlier).