Longly awaited by many fans, the new Mean Girls movie was finally released on January 12, 2024, starring actors Angourie Rice, Auli’i Cravalho, Christopher Briney, and finally Renee Rapp reprising her role from the stage musical which the new film was based on. Tina Fey and Tim Meadows also reprised their roles from the original film which the musical was based on.
The film’s development was confirmed by Paramount Pictures in January 2020. Fey returned to write the screenplay and produce the movie alongside 2004’s producer Lorne Michaels. Film composer Jeff Richmond wrote the score, while writer Nell Benjamin and composer Jeff Richmond came back to rewrite their songs from the stage show.
December 2022 marked the start of casting. In March and April of 2023, principal photography was conducted in New Jersey. Although the movie was supposed to debut on the streaming service Paramount +, the distributor decided to distribute the movie first in theaters in September 2023 after the movie received positive scores.
On January 8, 2024, Mean Girls made its debut on the big screen in New York City. On January 12, Paramount Pictures released the film in theaters nationwide.
The plot of the film is about a homeschooled teenager called Cady Heron who travels to the United States from Kenya with her mother and enrolls in North Shore High School. With the help of outsiders Janis and Damian, she makes an inroad into the clique of cruel girls known as the “Plastics.”
A sequence of events transpires as a result of Cady’s attraction to Regina’s ex-boyfriend, Aaron, as she plots to exact revenge on Regina for her deceptive behavior. Ultimately, Cady realizes the implications of her actions in a plot filled with deceit and tensions. She accepts accountability, makes amends with others, and gains insightful knowledge about compassion and friendship in the end.
You might want to reconsider your expectations if you’re going into Mean Girls believing it to be like the Broadway version. Regarding some of the alterations made to the Broadway songs, Jeff Richmond, the film’s composer, discussed them with The Hollywood Reporter. As it happened, a theatrical audience would have benefitted from a little modernization of some of those musical numbers.
“What we’re trying to do [with the movie] is take the score that sounds like a Broadway score — in a good way — and [give] the movie a fresher palette. To make it sound more like stuff you want to listen to on Spotify, as opposed to when you’re sitting eighth row center at a Broadway theater or the Pantages. It’s kind of making it a fresher, younger take on the whole thing. We’re kind of reinvented the music for the movie, so it’s really fun,” Richmond told the outlet.
Sophomore Azalie Sotolongo agreed with the idea that the film was in need of a fresher, more modern take on the music portion of the movie.
“I love the broadway version of Mean Girls a lot but honestly I really like that they gave the songs a bit of a refresh and made it more updated with time, still keeping it Mean Girl standard you know?” said Azalie.
Following the success of the 2004 film and 2018 Broadway musical of the same name, the new film is already making numbers, but not as much. Scoring a 70% on Rotten Tomatoes and 67% on the Audience score, we can see that the movie is not as loved as the original films, but will the successful legacy for the Mean Girls franchise continue or will it start to diminish because of this new movie?
