Written by Audrey Orenstein
Art by Eve Colabatistto
Unlike many moviegoers who are moviegoing to the 2024 film adaptation of the Broadway musical Mean Girls, I don’t have any nostalgia for the original 2004 film both are based on. As a trans woman, my exposure to “girly” movies of its ilk has been extremely limited for much of my life. I first watched that classic movie during the fall semester of 2023 when friends of mine learned that I hadn’t seen it and all but forced me to watch it on the spot. I went into it with no expectations and came out with those expectations met. That’s not to say that I didn’t enjoy it or that it isn’t a good movie, just that it’s not really for me. Still, I can absolutely understand and respect why so many other people love it. One of those people just so happens to be my boyfriend, a man who can be best described as “pink.” When the Mean Girls movie musical came to town, it jumped to the top of his priority list. As someone that loves new experiences, especially ones involving my boyfriend, I was more than happy to go see it at our local movie theater. However, some skepticism managed to sneak into my brain beforehand.
This was an adaptation of an adaptation. 2024 marks the 20th anniversary of the beloved original. Regardless of whether it adds to or subtracts from one’s experience viewing Mean Girls ‘24, the original is undeniably dated. The musical premiered on Broadway in 2018 and left little impact overall, as far as I or anyone I’ve talked to can tell. Still, I was curious to see what Mean Girls as a whole would look like after nearly two decades of evolving popular culture. My primary question to myself was, “What are they going to change and what are they going to keep?” Regrettably, my answer to that question is a sad one: everything that stayed didn’t work, and every change made was for the worst. Read on, loser, we’re going critiquing.
Disclaimer: this piece assumes that you, dearest reader, have at least watched the 2004 movie. I’ll be detailing the differences and similarities between versions, so it’s important to be familiar with the original context.
I think that the best place to start would be with the songs (after all, it wouldn’t be a musical without them). It’s worth noting here that I hadn’t heard the original Broadway cast recordings of these numbers before watching the movie, so my ability to compare the two was nonexistent. However, this did grant me the ability to judge them on their own merits (with my judgment being that the songs aren’t good).
As someone who quite enjoys musicals and knows a thing or two, I’d go as far as to say that they’re pretty bad. There are a lot of specific nitpicks that can be made about them, but I’d boil it down to the mixing and the singing. Instead of being mixed like Broadway tunes, all of the tracks are mixed like pop songs. This instantly saps a lot of that big, fun musical energy right out of the gate. This lack of energy is not helped by the singing, which is rough, to say the least. With the exception of Reneé Rapp and Jaquel Spivey, who play Regina George and Damian Hubbard, respectively, none of the main cast members have any professional experience with Broadway-style singing and it shows. Additionally, there’s almost no dancing or choreography throughout any of these songs, transforming them from musical numbers to monologues. This directly relates to another huge problem with the movie: the characters themselves.
In the original movie, Cady Heron (the main character who gets corrupted by the Plastics before redeeming herself) has an internal monologue that serves as narration, giving a lot of insight into her character. It’s also how some of the movie’s messages are delivered, such as in my favorite scene where she realizes that putting other people down doesn’t solve anything during the debate at the end. When the story was adapted into a musical, Janis and Damien became occasional narrators, too. Even though Cady’s internal monologue remains, it was cut significantly to account for this. While this does sometimes end up being a bit clunky, her character still mostly comes across via the songs that she sings.
The 2024 movie ditches all of this. Cady’s narration is now entirely gone. However, as if the movie were aware that her actress couldn’t really sing, a lot of her songs are cut, too. As such, the main character is left severely underdeveloped and uninteresting. It’s also worth noting that her introductory song in this movie is different from the one on Broadway. Her original number is “It Roars,” where she sings about how living in Africa is cool, but that she wants to see new things and meet new people. This has been replaced with “What Ifs,” where she sings about… wanting more out of life and taking risks. It drops any mentions of the life she’s lived in Africa or the life she wants in an American high school, making it painfully generic and completely forgettable. What’s worse is that this most likely happened for the same reason that a lot of movie musicals add a singular new song: to vie for the Oscar for Best Original Song in 2024. As much as this annoys me, I’m fully confident that this has no chance of winning, if it’s even nominated.
Since I’ve dedicated a majority of this piece to the music, you might be wondering if I’ll have room to talk about every other adaptational decision. Don’t you worry, though… there aren’t any. Just like the musical it’s based on, Mean Girls 24’ is more or less the original movie with songs and social media. Initially, that might sound just fine. After all, everyone loves the original Mean Girls! However, that begs the question: why not just rewatch the original Mean Girls?
This leads me to the subject of nostalgia, something that’s been quietly lingering in the background of this piece. As I said earlier, Mean Girls as a property is almost 20 years old. A lot of people grew up with the original film and have fond opinions towards it. I’m not saying those opinions are invalid just because they were largely formed during an impressionable time in the lives of most fans. In fact, writing this piece and deeply pondering all three versions has made me appreciate the original movie more than I did when I first watched it. However, I will say that nostalgia has kept the film’s positive qualities shiny and relevant.
Coming back to the Mean Girls Broadway musical, there’s a specific reason that I believe it was largely ignored: the Heathers musical. I watched the original Heathers movie long before I watched Mean Girls and I loved it dearly. Additionally, I quite enjoy the musical version, which has some great songs and fleshes out the characters well. However, something that makes the musical version stand out is that nostalgia was not a huge contributor to its considerable popularity in the past decade. A lot of people were exposed to the show before they had even heard of the movie it was based on. As such, it illustrates how that show was able to be its own entity and retell the story of Heathers without relying on people’s preconceptions of the original source material. This stands in stark contrast to every version of Mean Girls that isn’t the 2004 movie, especially the 2024 adaptation.
I return now to the question I previously posed: why not just rewatch the original Mean Girls? At its best, the new movie might remind you of how good the original is and how much you presumably love it. Even then, this “success” backfires when you realize that it’s relying on the memorability of those original characters and the lines they say because it doesn’t understand what made them memorable in the first place and can’t replicate them independently. Sure, if you go into a movie theater showing Mean Girls ‘24 wearing pink-colored glasses, you’ll probably have a good enough time. However, without those glasses, all that’s left is a bad movie musical.
What’s interesting is that I don’t think this is much better than other recent movie musicals like Cats, which received much more backlash than this did when it was released in 2019. While that movie is indeed terrible, it’s also based on a 1982 Broadway musical that, while well-known in the musical community, is far less mainstream than Mean Girls ‘04. In other words, it couldn’t ride its originator’s coattails as successfully as I believe the Mean Girls musical and its subsequent movie adaptation have. On one hand, such nostalgia has saved Mean Girls ‘24 in the short term; on the other, it may well have doomed it in the long run.
Pretty much all media lives or dies on the hill of being memorable. When people watched Cats ‘19, many of them formed memories of how bad it was on its own merits, since it wasn’t able to remind them of a musical they had previously seen. Both the movie and musical versions of Heathers will be remembered because they’re good and unique tellings of a good and unique story. Flawed and cash-grabby though the original musical is, it’ll at least be somewhat remembered for that Broadway magic inherent to the medium. However, if you’re watching the new Mean Girls with pink-colored glasses, as most people have and will, memories associated with it won’t form. Since I don’t have a pair of my own, I’ll remember how bad it was. Yes, they might blind you from all of the film’s negative qualities. However, since all of the film’s positive qualities are borrowed from the original, the best memories that one could possibly associate with Mean Girls ‘24 are the memories they have of the 2004 classic it wishes it was.