There’s been an influx of people online saying they had no idea that Mean Girls (2024) was a musical. Saying this feels like seeing Hamilton on Disney+ and not knowing it was a musical. You literally hear Renee Rapp singing if you open a single trailer, yet people say they had no idea until they started singing. So now I will rant about how Mean Girls never hid that it was musical, and then I’ll give my opinion on the movie.
How it was Marketed
The main source of hate towards Mean Girls (2024) stems from people, who didn’t know it was a musical, seeing it. The trailers for Mean Girls didn’t show any songs, well except for the start of “Meet the Plastics’ ‘’. While more songs definitely should’ve been shown, there were clips of the dances in the trailer. So unless you constantly perform a choreographed dance while going to school every morning, it’s not very hard to deduct it’s a musical.
Songs
The songs in Mean Girls were definitely great, and were probably the best part of the movie. The songs were performed amazingly and almost no parts were cut, except “Meet the Plastics”, but it’s a very long song. So while it was unexpected for a lot of people, the songs in this movie were genuinely great.
However, despite being a musical, the songs didn’t seem to live up to their Broadway counterparts. Many people in theater/ musical theater have expressed this, saying the songs aren’t as big or emotional. Now, this doesn’t apply to some songs like “World Burn” or “Someone gets Hurt (Reprise)”, but this is because these songs are performed by people with a background in musical theater. And while most of the cast is involved in musicals, Angourie Rice, Cady’s actor, is not. This seemed to result in the remake of “Stupid with Love” which has a different instrumental and feels very flat in terms of emotion. However, I feel like Angourie Rice is exactly to blame, it’s not like she was the one that changed the song. In my opinion, it feels like “Stupid with Love” was changed to appeal more to the public, to be played on the radio, and since a lot of people don’t like musicals, they made it sound like an Addison Rae song. Despite this, Mean Girls has a lot more good songs then bad, and it shouldn’t be labeled as having bad songs just because of one.
How the story was Portrayed in the “Modern Day”
As most remakes of movies are, Mean Girls is set in 2024. Since it’s not 2004 anymore, there were some jokes that were rewritten to fit the year. There’s nothing wrong with that, and it actually helps adapt the characters better. In “Tina fey on ‘Mean Girls’ Then and Now” by Ashley Spencer, Tina Fey states, “ I know that even Regina would know what wouldn’t fly. She’s going to find a way to inflict pain on people, but she’s not going to get herself in trouble.” . Nothing from the movie is made worse because of the removal of a few jokes, and it allows the movie to be smarter with its writing by coming up with new material.
Moving on to social media, while I think the use of social media in this movie wasn’t horrible, it also had me cringing at moments. They use social media as if the whole world revolves around the school and the drama there, like everyone knows who Regina George is. They were showing grown women and men making videos covering what was happening at the school, and yes, it was on TikTok. However, this would be the only complaint about how the story translated, this is mostly because Tina Fey was advised by her daughters when trying to translate the story, this was said in a New York Times article “Tina Fey on “Mean Girls” Then and Now” By Ashely Spencer, ““Should the Burn Book be a physical book or does it have to be a Snapchat or something?” They were like, “No, don’t pander to us. It’s a book. Tell the story. We get it.” “
Overall
If you couldn’t already guess, I loved this movie. I’ve always loved Mean Girls and its musical, so I absolutely loved it. The humor was actually better than the first movie and the acting was amazing. Definitely recommend if you can tolerate musicals, it’s a great movie to kick off 2024 with.
