Cold, Shiny, Hard and Singing

Did the world need a film version of the Broadway musical adaptation of a 2004 teen comedy? Follow-up question: Did Mean Girls need to be adapted into a Broadway musical in the first place?

It turns out: Kind of yes?

Mean Girls ’24 may have cycled through theaters without much of a splash back in January, but I’m pretty sure it’ll find its audience now that it’s on disc -- and streaming on Paramount+, whatever. A generation of theater kids has been waiting for this, like, their entire lives, and the next generation will discover it because it’s absolutely rammed with A-list musical talent. Say what you will about the endless exploitation and recombination of IP, but if this the way we get Jaquel Spivey, the Tony-nominated star of A Strange Loop, and Actual Moana Auli’i Cravalho singing maniacally about destroying a high-school bully, I think I’m okay with it. (Also? Cravalho absolutely destroys her character’s big solo number, performed live and shot in a single continuous take.)

Plus, the home release of the Mean Girls musical means Paramount can sell the original 2004 Mean Girls again in a new 4K edition! I will not say this is fetch, because that’s what they want me to say, but it’s pretty nice.

Directed by Daniel Waters in a way that suggests he would really prefer not to invite comparisons to Heathers, the original Mean Girls is a non-repeatable event. It’s a really fun teen comedy with a wildly talented cast that was either already breaking out or just about to.

There’s Lindsay Lohan at her most casually goofy as fish-out-of-water Cady Heron, who uses her understanding of anthropology to infiltrate the savage land of American high-school culture, Rachel McAdams going all flinty as the brittle queen bee Regina George, early who’s-that-now turns from Lizzy Caplan and Amanda Seyfried, and screenwriter Tina Fey and producer Lorne Michaels roping in other SNL players for most of the grown-up roles.

The script chugs right along, an ur-teen comedy with clear stakes and archetypal characters we can root for and against, and while some elements have dated a little bit – the fat-shaming plot was never cool, you guys – the movie zips along cheerfully from start to finish. It doesn’t try too hard. It’s just having fun.

Mean Girls ’24, though? It wants you to see the effort. It’s all about the effort – cinematic, choreographic, melodic, you name it. That’s what people want from a musical, right? You need to know how hard everyone’s working in the name of a good time.

Scaled up from the Broadway adaptation – which was also written by Fey, who returns as screenwriter-producer here and reprises her role of math teacher Ms. Norbury alongside Tim Meadows’ Principal Duvall – it’s a pretty fun movie filled with good songs (“This is modern feminism talkin’ / Watch me as I run the world in shoes I cannot walk in”) and enthusiastic performances. Jon Hamm, Busy Philipps and Lohan herself turn up in cameos, all your favorite quotes are there and it’s okay that most of the teenagers are played by people in their early twenties.

Angourie Rice, who was Ryan Gosling’s daughter in The Nice Guys and Betty Brant in the Spider-Man movies, steps in as Cady opposite Reneé Rapp – who played Regina George on Broadway – and Avantika and Bebe Wood as the new incarnations of Regina’s sidekicks Karen and Gretchen. Cravalho and Spivey are the art losers Janice and Damian, who take Cady under their wing and immediately enlist her in an elaborate scheme to take Regina down, and Christopher Briney doesn’t have a lot to do as Cady’s love interest Aaron, but neither did Jonathan Bennett in 2004.

Rice is fine, Rapp is having a ball, Cravalho and Wood are doing something fun in the background of every shot, and Avantika full-on steals away with the picture as Karen, finding a lively new take on the bright-eyed, empty-headed comic relief character that broke Amanda Seyfried out twenty years ago.

And this iteration of Mean Girls looks great. The 2004 film wasn’t an especially stylish production – Waters and DP Daryn Okada shot it very competently, but the result looks very much like a studio comedy filmed in Toronto. (It’s fine! It’s just fine! It’s … just fine.) For the new film, directors Samatha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr. use the license of screen musicals to amp things up a lot more: Colors are brighter – there’s more hot pink in Mean Girls 2024 than you’ll find in a Pepto-Bismol commercial – costumes are just a little more elaborate, Bill Kirstein’s cinematography considerably flashier. And of course there’s a lot more going on sonically, with instruments careening around the soundstage in Dolby Atmos.

Of the two 4K discs, MG24 is the showstopper; the original film looks very good, and the new UHD master is a considerable improvement from the existing Blu-ray, but that film was never designed to dazzle. MG24 wants to dazzle. It’s all about the dazzle. And the rhymes. Still not gonna call it fetch, though.

Extras on Mean Girls ’24 include an overproduced gag reel, an extended scene, a music video for the closing-credits track “Not My Fault” and three production featurettes, one of which acknowledges the dilemma of remaking a movie where the ostensible villains turned out to be the most beloved characters. (Of course they were; the Plastics had all the best lines.) There’s also a sing-along option – available for the entire film, or in a 45-minute version that’s just the songs – for the next generation of theater kids and art losers.

The 2004 Mean Girls offers all the previous extras – featurettes, outtakes, deleted scenes and audio commentary from Daniel Waters, Tina Fey and Lorne Michaels – along with a new featurette. Made by No Roads Productions – and, I suspect, originally intended to be included with the new film – “Class of ’04” lets Fey and the cast of the new film discuss their predecessor with all the reverence due to a beloved classic.

... no, I don't want to think about that either.

Both Mean Girls ’04 and Mean Girls ’24 are available now in individual 4K and Blu-ray editions from Paramount Home Entertainment. No school buses were harmed in either film.