‘Mean Girls’ makes ‘fetch’ happen again with movie musical remake 20 years later
Two decades after it first joined the zeitgeist, it’s time to make “fetch” happen again for a new generation.
That’s right, the new movie musical remake of “Mean Girls” opens in theaters nationwide this Friday.
The franchise began in 2004 with a coming-of-age comedy written by Tina Fey and directed by Mark Waters. It starred Lindsay Lohan as the 16-year-old Cady Heron who returns to the U.S. from being home-schooled abroad in Africa to a public high school in Illinois. There, she meets Regina George (Rachel McAdams), a popular mean girl who runs a clique called The Plastics, including Gretchen Wieners (Lacey Chabert) and Karen Smith (Amanda Seyfried in her debut).
In 2017, a stage musical version made its world premiere at the National Theatre in D.C. before earning 12 Tony nominations on Broadway in 2018. The musical featured original songs written by Jeff Richmond (music) and Nell Benjamin (lyrics), including “A Cautionary Tale,” “Meet the Plastics,” “World Burn” and “I’d Rather Be Me.”
Now, Broadway alum Renee Rapp returns as Regina George for the new movie version, while Angourie Rice (“Spider-Man: Homecoming”) plays Cady Heron and Auli’i Cravalho (“Moana”) plays Janis ‘Imi’ike. The supporting cast also includes Jenna Fischer, Busy Philipps, Jon Hamm and Ashley Park, who earned a Tony nomination for Best Actress in a Featured Role in a Musical for originating the Broadway role of Gretchen.
Tina Fey and Tim Meadows also reprise their respective roles as Ms. Norbury and Principal Duvall, while Fey punches up her own script, which was originally based off the 2002 book “Queen Bees and Wannabes” by Rosalind Wiseman. The new film marks the directorial debut of co-directors Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr., while “SNL” creator Lorne Michaels coproduces the film with Fey for Paramount Pictures.
The movie was originally slated for a straight-to-streaming premiere on Paramount Plus, but the studio shifted to a big-screen release as the film industry steadily recovers from major pandemic declines and a pair of crippling labor strikes. Last year, the film industry generated $9 billion in the box office for the first time since the start of the pandemic, gradually building back to pre-pandemic levels of $12 billion in 2019.