Why the New ‘Mean Girls’ Was Never Going To Be a Success

There’s been major drama happening this past week. No, we’re not talking about those Oscar snubs. We’re talking about all those Mean Girls walkouts that flooded social media after the movie’s January 12 premiere.

If you were on TikTok last week, then you might have even seen a popular video showing audiences audibly groaning at the movie’s overuse of music. It’s since been removed for copyright reasons, but the fact remains that many Mean Girls fans were not happy with this modern update on the 2004 classic.

Of course, part of that disappointment was due to Paramount Pictures’ marketing of the film, which promised a straightforward remake and nothing else. In reality, the movie was a remake of the Mean Girls musical that hit Broadway in 2017. That meant that lines like “Is butter a carb” were suddenly replaced with endless songs written by Tina Fey’s husband, Jeff Richmond, and Nell Benjamin. And the original musical was not exactly Hamilton.

But viewers can be forgiven for not knowing Mean Girls was a musical. After all, similar stories have played out for The Color Purple and Wonka, both of which benefited from trailers obfuscating their musicality. In this case, however, Mean Girls’ real problem was that it was pretty mid.

Just like she did with the original Mean Girls, screenwriter Tina Fey lent a sly wit to this new iteration. But it rarely emerged – buried, as it was, under layers of contemporary updates. Some of these were necessary: Characters could now use social media, for instance. They also referenced veganism and gender-neutral toilets instead of slut-shaming each other (see: “Boo, you whore,” which was rightfully missing). Coach Carr’s sex-ed lecture was more attuned to 2024 sensibilities. And there were no landlines.

But Fey’s new screenplay refused to make the changes that fans actually wanted to see, a.k.a. making Regina George a closeted lesbian. Instead, Reneé Rapp was left to fill in the blanks and play the character as queer in her own mind. On top of this, the screenplay left out classic lines like “It’s like I have ESPN or something” in lieu of new jokes that often felt shoehorned in. (Also missing: The beloved “Oh my god, Danny DeVito, I love your work.”)

Even the fashion updates weren’t working. Though generally reminiscent of current Gen Z fashions, the film failed to create anything as instantly iconic as Regina’s pink cardigan lewk from the original flick. As Paper Magazine was able to discern from this film’s trailer alone, this new Mean Girls skipped creative contemporary costuming in favor of superficial 2020 updates.

Thus, when all was sung and done, the film amounted to exactly what it advertised: A mere remake of the wittier 2004 Mean Girls. Yes, the songs were there, but they didn’t add much. (More on that later.) This placed an unfair burden on the remake’s cast. That’s not to shade Reneé Rapp, who had rizz to spare and ate in every scene. But it is to say that hilarious performers like Busy Philipps had to work hard to escape their predecessors’ shadow. And considering that this “new” version had the same plot, characters, and dialogue as the original, it practically begged viewers to compare these actors to their 2004 counterparts. Obviously, nothing can compare to Amy Poehler declaring herself a “cool mom,” sorry.

To her credit, Tina Fey did try to make this cinematic cash grab into something fresh. “It’s tricky because jokes have to be surprises to work,” she told Entertainment Weekly. “There’s a little nostalgic dopamine that we get, but I learned doing the musical that if you want it to play as a joke, it’s not going to play the same if it’s just the same. So finding genuine new moments and then finding spots to subvert what you expect the old line to be was really helpful.”

But Fey still left in many old jokes to keep fans happy, which created an uphill battle in her quest to make a “new” Mean Girls. And then there were those very meh songs. Those were actively working against anything Fey could do.

When Mean Girls hit Broadway in 2017, it received very middling reviews – mostly because of its music. Songs like Gretchen Wieners’ “What’s Wrong With Me” barely scraped the surface of these characters’ psyches, serving more as musical bookends than insightful showstoppers. Instead, they stated the obvious in an earnest, often straight-faced way – and without any catchy hooks to lift them up. None of them, save for Janis Ian’s “I’d Rather Be Me” (and maybe “World Burn”), were memorable.

In fact, the 2024 Mean Girls apparently recognized this and graciously cut many songs from its soundtrack, including the run-of-the-mill “Where Do You Belong?,“ “Fearless,“ “Whose House Is This?,” and “More Is Better.” But the remaining songs, although better, did not reach the heights of, say, “Defying Gravity.” Consequently, viewers were only left with Tina Fey’s beloved original lines from the 2004 version to keep them entertained. And even those didn’t hit as well, since they were crammed in simply as fan service.

All that being said, we can at least be grateful that Renée Rapp is becoming a household name and that Avantika Vandanapu is the Internet’s newest It Girl. The rest of this cast is nothing to sniff at, either. Even Lindsay Lohan might benefit from all this press – especially after Tina Fey shaded her in the script.

Let’s just hope that the next projects for these women don’t induce mass walkouts.