Speaking of apex predators, viewers would rather watch this horrendous TV movie with a 17% RT score than the new ‘Mean Girls’

We knew the audience reaction to 2024’s Mean Girls was lackluster, but being dethroned by a TV movie is a fate far worse than Regina George’s open-mouth kiss with a school bus.

The Reneé Rapp-starring Mean Girls musical — a reboot of the iconic 2004 original that many believe didn’t need to happen — was the subject of much criticism upon its release in January, and it appears that negative reception has transcended from the theatres to the streaming world. 

Mean Girls is currently being outperformed on Paramount Plus by Lake Placid: Legacy, a 2018 TV movie boasting a whopping 11% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. For those unfamiliar (which is most of us, if we’re being honest), Lake Placid is a creature feature with questionable CGI that follows a group of explorers as they encounter a deadly predator. It’s kind of like The Meg, if The Meg was able to somehow be trashier than it already is. 

While the resurgence of Lake Placid might seem inexplicable, there could be an unlikely crossover that prompted the renewed attention. Those who were too shocked by the revelation that Mean Girls was, in fact, a musical, might’ve missed one of the film’s key numbers. Titled ‘Apex Predator’, the song is performed by Auliʻi Cravalho’s Janis and Jaquel Spivey’s Damian and sees the duo take aim at Regina George as their high school’s apex predator. 

‘Apex Predator’ — which also features in the Broadway show upon which the movie is based — appears relatively early into Mean Girls, so fans who weren’t enjoying the film might’ve dipped out and searched for an actual predator in the form of Lake Placid, which in that case is a gigantic, CGI mess of a crocodile. The plummeting streaming status of Mean Girls is perhaps to be expected, since the movie was compared to Cats (pause for collective shudder), and was largely thought to have fallen short in trying to make ‘fetch’ happen. 

Granted, we should cut the musical some slack, since it was always going to pale in comparison to the original, which spawned enough catchphrases to constitute a novel, has its very own day of celebration (“it’s October 3rd!”) and is personally quoted by this writer on a daily basis. You’d be surprised how often “is butter a carb?” comes up in everyday conversation. 

In any case, it’s a sad day to be Regina George, who this time was not taken out by a bus driver, but by a 2018 TV movie that most of us probably haven’t even heard of. Get in loser, we’re going even further down the streaming charts!