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Credit: Disney Channel
The Jonas Brothers have officially returned home to Disney with their Disney+ Christmas special, A Very Jonas Christmas Movie, which recently premiered amid the 2025 movie schedule. Honestly, it reminds me a lot of their Disney Channel days of Jonas and Camp Rock. Thankfully, the brothers seem to be just as nostalgic as I am these days, and have signed onto the long-awaited Camp Rock 3, returning to the franchise that seemingly launched them to another level of stardom. The JoBros recently revealed the wild story behind Joe’s original Camp Rock audition, and let’s just say they were lucky to even get a call back.
There’s a popular misconception that the Jonas Brothers were a band Disney created, encouraged by media like South Park, which poked fun at their Disney roots and purity rings. The actual truth is that the band of brothers hustled on their own dime for nearly two years before signing with Walt Disney Records. The JoBros were flying by the seat of their pants, and it led to Joe Jonas recording perhaps the worst audition tape Disney had ever seen. Nick Jonas told Entertainment Weekly how the chaotic story fell into place:
Joe got the role of Shane Gray in Camp Rock as our band was already doing its thing for a couple years. We were on tour — we were on the ‘theme park circuit’…wherever we could basically get booked and put on a free show. But things were starting to work, and ‘Year 3000’ was starting to bubble, and we felt like we had some momentum, but we needed something to propel us. So Joe gets this call to audition for this Disney movie, and I recall us helping him do his self-tape audition in our hotel room. Like a Holiday Inn in Albuquerque or something.
All this and more is detailed in the Jonas Brothers’ Prime documentary Chasing Happiness, which happens to be one of the best music docs I’ve seen. It shows how the brothers got into performing, all the way to the band breaking up and finally reuniting in 2019. It’s incredible how much footage they have of Kevin, Nick, and Joe Jonas as kids, from about age 3 and on, it’s almost like they knew they were going to be famous.
You have to remember though, this was the ‘90s into the 2000s. The Jonas Brothers were in their prime My Space era and were constantly capturing everything on video. It wasn’t always the best quality, something Nick said wasn’t great for his brother’s Camp Rock audition:
We used this thing called a Flip Vid — my millennial folks out there, you might know what it is. It was like the first-gen of like a camera that had a USB connected, and you could upload videos. We did that, but it looked terrible.
Kevin Jonas recalled holding a hotel lamp pointed straight at his brother, presumably while Nick filmed, and I just have to think that made the video quality worse somehow. Now, imagine sending that crappy home video taken in a hotel room to the big execs at Disney Channel. To no surprise, the Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle actor said the head honchos over at the House of Mouse thought it had to be prank:
The Disney execs called our dad, who was one of our managers at the time, and were like, ‘Is this a joke? This is the worst-looking video we’ve ever seen.’ Not his audition, but the quality of the video. So we got a better tape, and he got the job.
Man, what I would give to see that OG Camp Rock audition tape, though the Cup of Joe host joked to EW that Disney has it “somewhere in their vaults.” I guess I’ll have to settle for the real thing, when Camp Rock 3 eventually premieres on Disney+, hopefully sometime next year on the 2026 movie schedule.
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