“Filming something totally RAD today,” Maria Canals-Barrera, 53, aka Teresa Russo from Wizards of Waverly Place, posted to Instagram on March 7. In the picture, she posed along with her WOWP costars David DeLuise, 48, David Henrie, 30, and Jennifer Stone, 27, who played Jerry Russo, Justin Russo, Harper Finkle, respectively, on the Disney Channel original series. This epic selfie also included High School Musical’s Coach Jack Bolton, aka Bart Johnson, 49, and his wife, Teen Witch star Robyn Lively, 48, indicating that something magical and totally “#80s” was going down. Yet, all fans could talk about in the comments section was the lack of Selena Gomez, 27.
“Where Selena.” “Ah Wizards! Just missing Alex [Selena’s character] and Max! [Jake T. Austin]” “Where’s max and alex?” “OH MY GOD WHERE’S SELENA” “WHERE IS SELENA” “@selenagomez where are u” “I can’t believe that Jennifer Stone is back acting again. I can’t believe that @selenagomez is not there.” “I’m sorry, what?!?” “WHERES ALEX AND MAX RUSSO” “If this has to do with wizards of waverly place and Selena is not involved. Keep it” “This is amazing. All we need now is Max, Alex, and our star athlete Troy Bolton.” “where’s selenaaaaa?”
It’s unclear as to what is going down with 3/5 of the Russo family, the coach from High School Musical, and Lana Budding Milford from Twin Peaks. Considering that WOWP ran from 2007 to 2012, it’s couldn’t be some 80s-nostalgia skit on The Tonight Show, so fans might have a right to suspect that this is the start of something special.
In fact, the odds of a WOWP revival are better than you think. “Selena and I have a reboot,” David told ET Live in Sept. 2019. “We sit and talk about it all the time. It’s not formal, but Selena and I sit, and we talk about what would the reboot be. We have a whole take. We have a whole thing.”
“What made the Russos special is that we were a family,” David added. “The show ended, someone won the competition. We want to start the show a few years later — start them off at the worst place ever so throughout the series you give them a nice beautiful arc of reuniting. Start them out divided, Alex is a fashionista off killing it in some other part of the realm, Justin’s like the principal who has a family now … Max has the sub shop, but it’s run-down. Start us all completely discombobulated, and then throughout the course of the series, you bring us all together.”