Many people have many strong feelings about the new Mean Girls movie. The spectrum of opinions about this film range from absolutely hating it to loving it.
Some people are arguing that the publicity for this movie was flawed. They believe that it wasn’t actually advertised as a musical and only found out like two songs in. I don’t see how that was even possible. They sang in the trailer and had dancing as well. They even released a new song before the release date that was then featured in the film. There’s also the fact that the actress that played Regina George, Renee Rapp, played the same character on Broadway as well at age 19. Multiple leads in the movie were musicians of some sort. For example, Renee Rapp and Auli’i Cravalho, who some may know from her role as Moana in 2016.
I believe that if this movie didn’t have a reputation that they had to uphold, and they didn’t have the comparison of the original that it would be seen as better than it was. One of the main reasons people are hating this movie is because they have original source material they are obligated to compare it to, the original 2004 movie and the Broadway musical from 2017. They did change the songs and even left some of the originals out of it entirely. Songs like It Roars, Where Do You Belong, the majority of Meet The Plastics, Fearless, Stop, What’s Wrong With Me Reprise, Whose House Is This, More Is Better, and Do This Thing were cut. But, they did write two new songs called What Ifs and Not My Fault (with Megan Thee Stallion). A particular member of the cast even refused to sing which led to the writers cutting out many of their songs; I think at that point they should have recast.
Another thing people are having strong feelings about are the songs themselves. People like the original source material. People like the original ways these songs sound, but it sounds like there is a lot more autotune and new background music. Fans like what they know and some of the lyrics in the songs were changed. There are some good reactions to a few lines, however, instead of the lyric being “This is modern feminism talking, I expect to run the world in shoes I cannot walk in” as sung in the original, the movie changed it to “This is modern feminism talking, watch me as I run the world in shoes I cannot walk in”. This gives a different connotation as compared to the Broadway musical, and many women are thankful for this, as they feel its more empowering. Of course, there were many modern adaptations from the 2004 movie and the Broadway musical, like flip phones to smartphones, but Broadway kept some things the same.
The movie was also made as more of a modern adaptation as opposed to the original. For example, one of the most famous scenes where World Burn takes place in the musical: the moment Regina prints out the Burn Book and throws the papers everywhere for everywhere. They maintained this aspect on Broadway from the original, but in this 2024 musical, they changed it to someone posting it and sending pictures to each other and making TikToks about it. I personally did not like this aspect of the new installment. I believe some things should remain as they are. At one point, the writer of the movie, Tina Fey, said she contemplated making the Burn Book online, or even a Google Doc.
In my opinion, they also did wrong by some of the characters, for example, Karen. In the original, we see by the end, Karen has more personality and is being more independent. We see her get a job doing the weather reports at school. Whereas in this one, she just ends up with a romance with a guy in the theater program. There were just a lot of original moments that made the old movie so iconic that were cut, like Cady’s inner monologue the whole movie. A majority of the jokes are from the original, and I understand that this is because they wanted to clean up this movie a bit from its 2004 era, but I don’t believe that it does it justice. I believe that if you are doing a remake, you can’t get rid of almost everything that made it famous and iconic in the first place; that would be like if they redid Star Wars without lightsabers. You can’t cut the most loved parts. Other than this I think that if this movie was a standalone it would be great, but with the comparison, it just doesn’t hold up.
