Time to be Mean: Stop Trying to Water Down Musical Theatre for the General Public

Everyone loves a movie based on a musical that’s based on a classic early 2000s movie, right? right?

20 years after the classic Mean Girls movie came out, Hollywood thought, “What if we do it again, but worse?” To be clear, I really enjoy the Mean Girls musical on Broadway. It is camp, fun, and full of talent from the entirety of the original and subsequent casts. So what’s wrong with the movie adaptation? Why did the original 2004 movie garner an average of 3.8 stars on letterboxd, while the musical remake sits firmly at 2.5 stars?

The largest complaint I believe many had was the marketing for this movie. The trailer showed no indication that this was going to be a movie musical. This is a classic case of the team not understanding who their target audience should be. They want to toe the line between original movie fans and musical theatre fans. The movie marketing ended up teetering more towards movie fans which led to large disappointment from the musical theatre haters showing up to theaters expecting their precious cult classic. If you are making a movie musical, tell people that it is a movie musical.

I would be remiss to not also discuss the casting of this movie. How can you cast Broadway powerhouses such as Reneé Rapp and Auliʻi Cravalho and still manage to have a failure of a musical. These women are perfectly cast and it is a shame that the movie turned out the way it did. At the end of the day, it is super disappointing to have this insanely talented cast and squander it with the choices that make it less of a musical.

The biggest mistake in choices made, in my opinion, is the staging of the song “Stupid With Love.” This song in the musical is a desperate ‘I want’ song where Cady grows increasingly ecstatic throughout the song. The movie version dulls it down to a point where it feels as though Cady doesn’t even really believe what she is saying. It takes away from the easily excited quirkiness of her character.

Not only are they mischaracterizing their main character, they are also mischaracterizing the entirety of the movie and the Broadway show. The original movie is a classic for a reason. For this version, it feels as though they took the worst of the musical and the worst of the movie and put it together. Taking out iconic lines from the musical such as “and you can quote this” from the song “World Burn.” All the while, adding in more modern elements like TikTok dances. People don’t want a modernized, TikTok in your face, version of a classic. They want the classic. They can get TikTok from TikTok.

The on-stage musical version is camp with well thought out costuming, set design, and jokes. It keeps the fun of the original while adding engagement that can really only be done on the stage. When you take it back to the movie, you get rid of everything that made the stage version different from the 2004 version, it being live and on stage. If you are planning on making a remake, it needs to add something or be better than the original. Mean Girls (2024) creates a meta that rivals High School Musical: The Musical: The Series and fails miserably at even being a camp meta movie. It takes all the bite and grit out of the original and all of the camp and fun out of the musical.

Stop trying to water down musicals for the general public. Trying to be “not like other girls” as a musical isn’t going to make musical haters like it. It is still a musical, now it’s just a bad one.