The Legacy of Mean Girls and the Decline of Pop Culture
The beloved cult teen film has spawned a new musical to celebrate its twentieth anniversary.
The original Mean Girls premiered twenty years ago this spring, but it might as well have come out yesterday. The Middle East is, again, still, at war with the West. Britney Spears looks out from every tabloid. After years of cancel culture, being controversial is great again. And, just as in 2004, Mean Girls is everywhere. The 2023 Walmart Christmas ad starring Lindsay Lohan, Amanda Seyfried, another original Mean Girl, and (for some reason) Missy Elliott. The return of Lohan as a romantic comedy star, via Netflix holiday flicks and an announced Disney+ Freaky Friday sequel. Even one of the film’s most banal lines — “On October 3, he asked me what day it was,” Lohan’s character says about her crush interacting with her in math class — has led to floods of Mean Girls memes every October 3.
In 2004, Mean Girls was far from the biggest movie of the year, but today, it’s a major cultural touchstone. So it was inevitable that Paramount would remake it. The studio greenlit a cinematic version of the Mean Girls Broadway musical for the Paramount+ streaming service, and now it’s been upgraded to a theatrical release, hitting screens this month. It’s both a reminder of the original Mean Girls legacy and how far pop culture has fallen in the past twenty years.
Read more in The Spectator.