A Musical Reboot That Can’t Cross the Generational Gap
The reboot of the classic teen comedy Mean Girls sands off its source material’s edges, to mixed results.
Updated at 11:39 a.m. ET on January 12, 2023
Raise your hand if you’ve ever been personally victimized by a Hollywood reboot. I’ll go first: The latest ouroboros of intellectual property juicing to get under my skin is the new Mean Girls film, which is adapted from a Broadway musical based on the original 2004 movie. (You wouldn’t know it from watching most of the curiously tuneless trailers, though!) Somewhere inside this extended branding exercise is the familiar tale of Cady Heron (played by Angourie Rice in the new film), a teenage girl thrust into the baffling social hierarchy of a fictional Illinois high school after being homeschooled her entire life.
Twenty years after the eminently quotable
