Um, is this news fetch or so not fetch? Mean Girls is getting a remake, but there’s a twist: the new movie will be a musical.
It’s a real Russian nesting egg situation. The 2004 teen comedy written by Tina Fey and starring Lindsay Lohan is the source material for the Mean Girls musical, which hit Broadway in 2018 with a book written by Fey. While there were some minor changes to the Mean Girls story — specifically, the inclusion of social media, which was in its infancy in 2004, the brilliant inclusion of a feminist Karen Smith, and the tragic removal of the “Jingle Bell Rock” dance — the characters and general plot thread remained intact. The new film’s synopsis, as revealed in a press release, doesn’t seem like it’s reinventing the story, either.
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“Cady Heron may have grown up on an African savanna, but nothing prepared her for the wild and vicious ways of her strange new home: suburban Illinois. How will this naïve newbie rise to the top of the popularity pecking order? By taking on The Plastics, a trio of lionized frenemies led by the charming but ruthless Regina George. But when Cady devises a plan to end Regina’s reign, she learns the hard way that you can’t cross a Queen Bee without getting stung.”
While Mean Girls hasn’t quite crossed into Spider-Man territory, a reboot of the film feels a little...soon, no? The celebrated teen comedy is already one of the most quoted films of the last two decades, and though Twitter wasn’t even invented when it hit theaters, the movie has cornered the market on reaction GIFs. The movie is so iconic Ariana Grande reenacted it for her “thank u, next” video just last year.
Alas, because the limit does not exist when it comes to studios remaking properties they own, a Mean Girls reboot is here, it’s happening, and it’ll probably star one of the Stranger Things kids as Aaron Samuels.
“I’m very excited to bring Mean Girls back to the big screen,” Fey said in a statement. “It's been incredibly gratifying to see how much the movie and the musical have meant to audiences. I've spent sixteen years with these characters now. They are my Marvel Universe and I love them dearly.”
The only thing we can hope for now is that the Mean Girls reboot is so good, it does not warrant a place in our personal burn books.