The Cheetah Girls
Four New York friends, a girl group, and matching cheetah print. The Cheetah Girls premiered August 15, 2003, as Disney Channel's first musical original movie, drew 6.5 million viewers, and turned Raven-Symoné, Adrienne Bailon, Kiely Williams, and Sabrina Bryan into a real touring act with two sequels and an arena tour.
Deborah Gregory began writing The Cheetah Girls books in 1999, inspired by Destiny's Child and her own childhood dreams of stardom; the series about five ambitious girls who form a singing group ran to 16 novels plus film tie-ins and won the Blackboard Children's Book of the Year in 2001. Disney's adaptation, produced by Whitney Houston and Debra Martin Chase with Gregory as a co-producer, shot in Toronto and Manhattan in late 2002 and cut the group to four: Galleria "Bubbles" Garibaldi (Raven-Symoné), Chanel (Adrienne Bailon), Aquanette "Aqua" (Kiely Williams), and Dorinda (Sabrina Bryan), with Lynn Whitfield as Galleria's mother and a producer named Jackal Johnson as the villain.
It premiered August 15, 2003, as the first musical Disney Channel Original Movie, and its 6.5 million viewers made it the top-rated basic-cable telecast and a Disney record at the time. The DVD sold more than 800,000 copies, and the soundtrack, out three days before the movie with "Cinderella" as a single, reached No. 33 on the Billboard 200 and went double platinum. Bailon and Williams had come from the group 3LW, and the movie's group became a real one.
The Cheetah Girls 2 aired August 25, 2006, shot entirely in Barcelona (even the New York scenes), and drew more than 8.1 million viewers; its soundtrack hit No. 5 and went platinum. The Party's Just Begun Tour ran from Seattle on September 15, 2006, to the Houston rodeo on March 4, 2007, with Miley Cyrus as Hannah Montana, Vanessa Hudgens, and Jordan Pruitt opening on various legs, and sold more than 620,000 tickets.
Raven-Symoné confirmed in August 2007 that she would skip the third film, later saying she had felt "excluded" and "ostracized" on the second one's set. The Cheetah Girls: One World aired August 22, 2008, shot in Udaipur, India, to 6.2 million viewers; the remaining trio toured that fall and disbanded in late December 2008. In July 2026 Disney confirmed The Cheetah Girls: Next Gen, with Raven-Symoné and Bailon returning.
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