Back to school: why we keep returning to Mean Girls

Because time is a construct, it’s the year 2024, and the biggest film at the box office is … Mean Girls. That would be the new movie adaptation of the hit Broadway musical based on the beloved 2004 film, which feels like a distinctly modern case of IP ouroboros. (Think High School Musical: the Musical: the Series, but more lucrative.) Despite harsh-to-middling reviews and several trailers noticeably avoiding any of the film’s musical numbers, the new Mean Girls topped the MLK holiday weekend box office with $33m, out-earning the original in absolute terms (adjusted for inflation, the first Mean Girls would have made around $40m on opening weekend). And, true to the spirit of the original, the Mean Girls musical movie has generated its own stream of memes – for not knowing it was a musical, for example, or for star Reneé Rapp Regina George-ing a tour bus company owner during a press junket.

Related: Mean Girls review – high-school sadism comedy as sugar-rush movie musical

For skeptics, interest in the new Mean Girls rides heavily on some differentiation from the modern classic. “It’s not just a remake of the original,” I heard one woman say as recommendation after a pilates class. “There are new songs and jokes.” Which is true, to an extent – original writer (and Ms Norbury) Tina Fey has updated the script for the times, tucking in jokes about slut-shaming and TikTok. Costume designer Tom Broecker somewhat controversially took just as much inspiration from “on Wednesdays, we were pink” as the vibrantly hued teens of Euphoria. There are several musical numbers by Fey’s husband Jeff Richmond (music) and Nell Benjamin (lyrics). Still, the new version struggles to justify its existence, frequently feeling like a glossier yet overrehearsed karaoke performance of an unmatchable original.

But if the success, or even the existence of, the new Mean Girls proves anything, it’s that love for that original runs deep, enough to make any riff on the concept baseline enjoyable. For a movie that hit the zeitgeist fully two decades ago, with all the dated references that entails, Mean Girls maintains a remarkably solid grip on the culture. Interest in the new one only demonstrates a point made by Jennifer Keishin Armstrong in her new book, So Fetch: The Making of Mean Girls (And Why We’re Still So Obsessed With It – that arguably no 2000s movie has had as much impact on pop culture as Mean Girls. After 20 years and countless “you can’t sit with us” references, we just can’t quit Mean Girls.

The film has stayed relevant due, in part, to its relatability. The byzantine rules and codes of the Plastics – the clique of Regina George (Rachel McAdams/Reneé Rapp), Gretchen Wieners (Lacey Chabert/Bebe Wood) and Karen Shetty (Amanda Seyfried/Avantika Vandanapu) – were always heightened, and the methods and means of cliques have wildly changed. But the concept of a dizzying maze of hyper-local social specifics – one that would baffle a theoretical alien to teenage girl world like Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan/Angourie Rice) – remains. “Bullying and social power dynamics have not abated in the least, and may have gotten starker because of factors like social media and, in a broader sense, polarization in America,” said Armstrong via email. “We all relate to this on some level, no matter our age or gender identification.”

It helps that the film is just very, very quotable. There are so many Mean Girls lines floating through the ether of pop culture, in memes, gifs and TikToks – “it’s October 3rd,” “there’s a 30% chance that it’s already raining” and “get in loser, we’re going shopping” to name just a few. If you were in a school environment, a girl’s locker room, or the mall at any point between the years 2004 and 2014, you certainly heard them. There’s also the title, which serves as a shorthand for a certain type of behavior that has aged well into the 2020s obsession with girlhood. “You’ll hear people refer to ‘Mean Girls’ behavior and immediately understand what they mean, whether you’re referring to teen girls, a boardroom, a reality show, or national politics,” said Armstrong.

The stickiness of Mean Girls benefited from timing; it was released at the advent of MySpace and Facebook, imprinting on millennial brains just before they began posting on social media and, later, producing and running era-defining media sites like BuzzFeed. Mean Girls was “foundational for Web 2.0”, said Armstrong, an easily dissected text for the nascent genre of memes. The film also tied into the aughts tabloid culture through Lindsay Lohan, who hit peak fame with Mean Girls and, shortly thereafter, became a headline-grabbing paparazzi target and a cautionary tale via the era’s freewheeling, often vicious blogosphere – the mean girls of the internet at the time, if you will.

All of that doesn’t necessarily translate into the current digital, video-heavy landscape or appeal to gen Z or gen Alpha, the oldest of which are (terrifyingly) in their freshman year of high school. The new film tries to appeal to such media fluency via front-facing cameras, a gesture at TikTok, and a plot point that briefly turns into viral Instagram content mocked by a chorus of North Shore high school students. But Armstrong found, in research for her book, that younger audiences – those now in junior high and high school, for whom Mean Girls was ostensibly set – still connect with the original film. Even if they haven’t seen it, the quotes live on in memes and TikTok. The Y2K outfits are an on-trend aesthetic, the pre-cellphones school life distantly chic.

“It’s always so hard to know how long pop cultural artifacts are going to last, but it has held up for 20 years, and the ideas at its core seem to be universal and unchanging,” said Armstrong. It’s definitely possible Mean Girls will remain a coming-of-age classic, like a John Hughes movie, Clueless or Rebel Without a Cause. The same might not be said for the new movie musical. “We do have the new version,” Armstrong noted, “but my guess is that we’ll always want to go back to the original.”