Miley Cyrus’s status as a teen idol has taken a knock in a poll of teens and tweens, reflecting the tough time many celebrities have making the transition from child star to a young woman. But is she really the worst celebrity influence — on tweens — of the year?

The poll of 9-15 year olds on the web site JSYK.com seemed to suggest that Miley’s star might be fading after a roller-coaster three-year reign as one of the most popular teens in the world.

In some unsettling results, Miley was deemed to have a worse influence on her younger fans than the likes of Kanye West — who was almost universally condemned for hijacking Taylor Swift’s moment of glory at the MTV Video Music Awards in September — and Britney Spears — a sad example of the price of huge fame at an early age.

But Miley’s standings in the role model stakes don’t seem to be hurting her popularity. Her “Hannah Montana” show is still bringing in bumper ratings for Disney Channel and her latest single “Party in the USA” (the one that caused the fuss about pole dancing) is currently No.2 on the iTunes download charts.

So can Miley be seen as a bad influence but still retain her global popularity, or has she been overtaken by Taylor Swift?

And why do you think she has slipped so far in the opinion of the young fans who helped to rocket her to fame?

(writing and reporting by Dean Goodman)

The perky smiles on Disney’s fresh-faced teen stars are probably not so wide these days.

A month after the Jonas Brothers movie suffered a disappointing bow at the box office, Miley Cyrus ended her impressive run of chart-topping albums on Wednesday.

The 16-year-old starlet’s latest release, “Hannah Montana: The Movie” — the soundtrack to her upcoming feature headlining debut — opened at No. 2 on the Billboard 200.

More ominously, her sales were a fraction of the opening stanzas for her previous releases. The album sold 139,000 units during the week ended March 29, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

Last August, the star of the Disney Channel series “Hannah Montana” logged her third consecutive No. 1 with her “official” solo debut, “Breakout,” which opened with 371,000 copies sold. She began her run in October 2006 with the first “Hannah Montana” soundtrack, which started with 281,000 units. The succinctly titled 2007 follow-up, “Hannah Montana 2/Meet Miley Cyrus,” launched with 325,000.

The Jonas Brothers are still licking their wounds after the surprisingly weak performance of their movie, “Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience.” Long lines of frenzied tweens couldn’t prevent the movie from earning just $12.5 million during its opening weekend, and it quickly sank from there.

To make matters worse for Disney, the album that took this week’s top spot was the 30th installment of the “Now That’s What I Call Music” hits series, featuring a track from Miranda Cosgrove, a 15-year-old star on rival kids cable channel Nickelodeon.

Cosgrove, probably best known to adults as the David Geffen-worshiping class factotum in the Jack Black comedy “School of Rock,” released her debut EP “About You Now” exclusively on iTunes in February. It has managed to sell 381,000 copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

What’s up, of course, is “Hannah Montana The Movie,” which debuts in theaters nationwide on April 10 from Disney. In a little over a week, we’ll be talking to Miley about her new movie, and she’s agreed to take a few questions from Fan Fare readers. We’ll publish those in a Question and Answer story near the film’s release date.

In the movie, Miley’s “Hannah Montana” character, Miley Stewart, is struggling to juggle school, friends and her secret life as a pop singer that has soared into the stratosphere of stardom. So, dear ol’ dad (played by her real life father Billy Ray Cyrus) takes Miley back to Tennessee for an earth-bound reality check.

We did a similar Q and A request on the Fan Fare blog back in December with Adam Sandler for “Bedtime Stories,” and we thought it worked out well.

If you are or have a teen, ‘tween or any inquiring kid who wants to ask Miley a question, fire away in the comments section of the blog. We’ll pick a few and ask her.

Certainly people want to know how her Sweet 16th year is going. How about that gown she wore to the Oscars? Is she nervous about how well her first movie will be received by fans or critics? And what’s it like to be a real Hollywood star? But those are the easy ones. Tell us what you want to know.

Last year, then 15-year-old Miley Cyrus was the runaway hit at 3-D theaters when her “Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour” made $31.1 million its opening weekend at U.S. and Canada box offices in only 683 theaters.

Cyrus’ old friends the Jonas Brothers, who gained fame on her Disney television show “Hannah Montana,” are looking to eclipse that number when their 3-D concert movie opens in 1,271 theaters on Friday, and hundreds of theaters have been sold out.

Movie industry watchers expect the Jonas Brothers at No. 1 on the box office this weekend, giving Walt Disney Pictures another trophy 3-D success on top of its “Best of Both Worlds” smash hit the weekend of Feb. 1, 2008.  

“I’m thinking it can at least do as well as the Hannah Montana movie,” said Paul Dergarabedian, president of box office tracking firm Media by Numbers. “It would totally surprise me if it somehow did less.”

But given how few theaters ”Best of Both Worlds” opened in, the question is how “Jonas Brothers: the 3D Concert Experience” will match up against it on a per-theater basis. Going into the opening weekend  of Cyrus’ movie, Fandango.com and MovieTickets.com, the top online ticket sellers, said “Best of Both Worlds” accounted for more than 75 percent of their ticket sales a couple days before the opening. As of Thursday, the two companies reported that advance ticket sales for “Jonas Brothers” were below 64 percent of all sales, which is still strong but not quite as stellar as “Best of Both Worlds.”

 Disney needs a big success from “Jonas Brothers” more than it did from “Best of Both Worlds,” after reporting on Feb. 3 that quarterly profits fell 32 percent to $845 million compared to a year ago. One factor working in “Best of Both Worlds” favor was that it was originally planned to run in theaters for only one weekend, which had parents and their kids rushing to theaters before it was extended, experts said. 

But regardless, Dergarabedian still expects ”Jonas Brothers” could make $40 million its opening weekend, which is not a bad take for any film. The box office numbers will be driven by girls, in line with the female-oriented success of 2008 films “Twilight,” “Sex in the City” and ”Mamma Mia!,” he said. Hollywood has often geared its movies toward teen boys, so the fact that girls can make a movie a hit has many in the movie industry taking note.

The heat has been cranking up for months around 15-year-old singer and actor Miley Cyrus, and it rose even higher this week as the star fended off a much-publicized advertising offer from a condom maker and confessed to feeling overworked on her hit Disney Channel show “Hannah Montana.”

From the media firestorm around Miley come conflicting reports about her life and career, and one wonders if the young woman is more pawn than princess in a red hot Hollywood chess game. It all brings to mind the recent, personal meltdowns of Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan, who also broke through to fame as teenagers.  
    
Dr. Kimberly Williams, a pediatric neuropsychiatrist at New York University’s Child Study Center, said the national media spotlight can be too much for young stars like Cyrus. “This is just a typical teenager who just has peer pressure, social issues at school to worry about, and so now we add the weight of the nation and that kind of scrutiny,” Williams said.
    
Even though Cyrus wears a purity ring signifying her chastity until marriage, media reports this week said she received a $1 million offer from LifeStyles condoms to appear in an advertising campaign for the company. 
    
Cyrus’ representative told E! News the star had not even received an offer and that she would not even consider it. A spokeswoman for Lifestyles declined to comment.
    
Separately, Cyrus told E! News in an interview that she think her Disney Channel show “Hannah Montana” may be nearing its end. Cyrus portrays Hannah, who at school is just an average teenager but has another, secret life as a pop singing sensation.

“We’re thinking this is our last season,” Cyrus told E! The star said that she has played Hannah Montana since she was 11, and she added that the heavy work load included shooting “two seasons in one last year.”
    
But her representative downplayed Cyrus comments, telling E! that “Hannah Montana” not only starts production on a third season August 4 but also has an option for a fourth beyond that. A “Hannah Montana” movie is scheduled for a spring 2009 release.
    
“You’ve got a stressed out, depressed teenager who still has to go and go and go, and no one has time to hear, ‘Oh Miley, you’re tired,’” Williams said.
    
In April this year, a photo of a Cyrus apparently topless and covered with a only sheet emerged from a Vanity Fair magazine photo shoot by famed photographer Annie Liebovitz. Many Cyrus watchers saw it as far too adult for a 15 year-old, and Cyrus had to apologize to her fans. Yet this month Cyrus released a new pop CD called “Breakout” that she described as “grown up.”

Spears, 26, is an alumnus of the Disney star factory as she appeared on the Disney Channel as part of the Mickey Mouse Club when she was a child. Like many child stars, she encountered personal problems later in life and was briefly hospitalized twice earlier this year for psychiactric evaluation.

Lohan, 22, was a child star in Disney movie “The Parent Trap” in 1998. In recent years she has had problems with substance abuse and was arrested for driving under the influence, as she became known as a regular on the party circuit.

Is Miley headed for the same? We can only wait and watch.

(Reporting by Alex Dobuzinskis)

It’s not the most modest self-description, but one must remember that Miley Cyrus is only 15 years-old and a Hollywood celebrity. The singing star of “Hannah Montana” fame, has three words to describe herself “Coolest. Person. Ev-er!” she tells People magazine in a special Miley Cyrus issue set to hit newsstands on Friday, July 4. ”Really, I think I’m chill. I am very hyper but I’m very carefree.”

She also tells People her approach to life is to take things as they come. “Madonna always reinvents herself, and that’s what I want to do,” said Miley.   ”Whatever comes my way that sounds good, that’s what I want to do.   Whether it’s designing clothes or photography or whatever.”

The People interview follows a storm of controversy earlier this year after Vanity Fair magazine published photos of Cyrus, daughter of country singer Billy Ray Cyrus, that to some fans and parents seemed inappropriate for a 15 year-old girl. In one, she appeared to be topless and wrapped only in a blanket. She later apologized to fans and said she was “embarassed.”

She tells People that over the past year she’s learned a big lesson:  “I think knowing which people I can trust and being more aware of my surroundings.  I really had to work on that.  It’s like Dorothy — I’m not in Kansas anymore.  I’m not at home in Tennessee.”

And what does she have in common with the Hannah Montana character she portrays on the Disney Channel TV show? ”She’s changing up her style and that’s how I am too.  That’s how I think my real personality shines through,” Cyrus said. 

For the future, Miley is trademarking her name, People reported, and with sold out albums, a hit TV show and movie box office smash “Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert,” Miley could even build a showbusiness empire. “I like that word. Empire!” she told People. “There are a lot of options and a lot of it is because of who I am now. I just want to become something more than what I’m known as now.”

Tween sensation Miley Cyrus sang up a storm on the “American Idol” charity special “Idol Gives Back” but it turns out the Disney star is no fan of the most popular TV show (apart from her own) in America.

Cyrus, 15,  aka “Hannah Montana”,  performed two songs live at the Hollywood taping of the fundraiser at Hollywood’s Kodak Theatre on Sunday and recorded a mini segment highlighting the plight of impoverished kids in Kentucky, where her dad Billy Ray Cyrus was born and raised.

But asked backstage whether she was an “American Idol” fan, Cyrus chirped; “The funniest part is that I am so excited to be here but I have never seen it. Never seen even an episode.”

“I think it’s something you have to really get into,” she explained, adding that she has been pretty busy over the last couple of years — what with her own TV show, album, tour, apearance as an Oscar presenter etc.

C’mon Miley! Even bad boy rapper Snoop Dogg, who also appeared on the show to broadcast Wednesday,  said he watches AI  from time to time.