Zac Efron Is Taking Over the World

I'm not lying- everywhere I turned this past week it seems that Zac Efron was there. After the mega-successes of Hairspray last month (it recently joined Grease, Chicago and Dreamgirls as the only musicals to ever gross more than $100 million) and the record-breaking High School Musical 2, the world is ready to proclaim Efron the King of the World. The first to jump on this bandwagon was Rolling Stone.

Now, I haven't read Rolling Stone in about a year because it was getting too liberal even for me (every issue had someone ranting about global warming and everything else was about how Bush sucked) and the only thing I was reading was the film review. But as soon as I saw this cover, I had to pick up a copy. I know it's kind of a rip-off of that infamous Justin Timberlake cover but....damn.

The next day, while I was looking for some trashy magazine to read on my break at work, I was astonished that Efron was on like 5 different covers, either with or without High School Musical star Vanessa Anne Hudgens. I picked up a copy of People (in which Efron and Hudgens appeared together) and started reading. Here are some things I learned while reading these articles about Zac:

1. Apparently, my source was wrong for the last time I wrote about Efron because Zac and Vanessa (or Zanessa, as the tweens call them) are starting to come forward about their relationship. They're in love for reals.

2. Zac might be starring in a remake of Footloose but there is no director yet. He also might do a feature film version of High School Musical 3, but he doesn't want to be tied down to the series. He also might do some comedy called Seventeen about a 36 year old who gets transformed into the body of a high schooler (boy, that doesn't sound familiar or overused).

3. Zac respects real actors like Al Pacino and Matt Damon, loves the Die Hard and Bourne films and wants to be an action star.

4. Zac has abs of steel.

Riveting I know. But there is a bigger question that Entertainment Weekly asked in it's knewest issue: Will Zac Efron follow in the footsteps of other teenage stars like Johnny Depp or Leonardo DiCaprio or will he flounder like Christian Slater or Luke Perry? I'm really not sure- to me, he doesn't have the raw talent that Channing Tatum displayed last year and really only has that one strained, I'm-in-pain-can't-you-tell look that he gives a lot- but he could surprise us. If nothing happens with his career post-High School Musical, at least we'll always have Link: