Look, I get it; everyone likes to complain that Hollywood subsists on a diet of regurgitated IPs in the form of superhero franchises, remakes of films that made a lot of money, and whatever can most optimally weaponize nostalgia and any given moment.
But it’s a tired talking point for two reasons. The first is that fantastic original films are also getting released every other day, and the second is that it’s 100 percent possible for said IP films to be good. Nevertheless, sometimes those groans are earned, and Mean Girls was one such time.
But that didn’t stop it at the box office, and it’s not going to stop it now. Per FlixPatrol, the 2024 Mean Girls film based on the stage musical based on the original 2004 film (yes, this is the era we live in) has begun making a play on the Paramount Plus charts in the United States at the time of writing. Debuting in ninth place, its opponents include the sixth- and seventh-place Scary Movie and Scary Movie 2, as well as Quentin Tarantino’s alternate-history Nazi-killer Inglorious Basterds.
The film stars Angourie Rice as Cady Heron, a sixteen-year-old girl who was homeschooled in Kenya for most of her life before moving back to the United States to attend school for the first time. There, she comes to learn the nuances of high school cliques from her new friends Damian and Janis. She becomes fascinated with the “Plastics,” a group of three girls led by the ruthless Regina George (Reneé Rapp). Cady begins hanging out with them at the behest of the secret-seeking Janis, but a Plastic metamorphosis unknowingly awaits her.
Okay, so maybe Mean Girls (2024) isn’t a remake of the original Mean Girls in the purest sense, since it’s based on the Broadway musical that’s based on the original film. But that nevertheless scrutinizes its need to exist even more. Tina Fey struck gold with her screenplay back in 2004 to the point where it would be entirely fruitless to improve upon it, and Mean Girls (2024) certainly demonstrated such a thing.
The best parts of the musical film owe themselves entirely to the material that it’s based on, and while some of the choreography is richly cinematic, the musical numbers themselves do very little as either compartmentalized set pieces or storytelling assets. As for the slightly-altered ending from the original film, it’s a far cry from the slick conclusion that greeted us 20 years ago, which did a much better job of unpacking the indiscriminatory nature of emotional pain in teenagers and in human beings as a whole.
The moral of the story, then, is to save the remakes for the movies that would actually benefit from getting a new pair of creative hands on them, rather than dressing up old success for the modern era for the sake of making a fast buck. A Mean Girls remake was never going to be anything noteworthy, but could you imagine what someone could accomplish by remaking something like But I’m a Cheerleader?