“Mean Girls” & the Culture of Remaking, Rebooting, and Revising

Why contemporary remakes are stunting our collective media literacy

Remaking films has been woven into the DNA of cinema since the inception of the medium. Remakes are not an advent of the studio system, nor a new phenomenon indicative of Hollywood's contemporary risk aversion. The process of reimagining cinema as times and technologies evolve is a fundamental part of the artistic process. Georges Méliès remade two Louis Lumière films in 1896, the revolutionary The Great Train Robbery was a remake of a predecessor from only a year earlier, D.W. Griffith frequently remade his own silent films into talkies, and the list goes on.

But in 2024, remakes are often not artistic expansions in dialogue with their predecessor. In fact, they are usually the opposite: reductive flattenings of beloved pieces of media. So what has changed? 

Mean Girls (2024), and many other modern reimaginations, suffer because they are not designed to advance artistic statements. Instead, they exist to adjust the legacy of their predecessors. Studios (and artists) worry that evolving contemporary social standards may paint their past work in a bad light, and so they push out reproductions of beloved IPs, baiting audiences with nostalgia while insidiously using these remakes to remedy any perceived reputational damage.

Of course, acknowledgment and accountability for past faults is a productive trend for filmmaking, but Mean Girls (2024) — an unthoughtful, uninsightful and unimaginative reference to its previous iterations — exists only to re-write any original social failing. The film has nothing new to offer, and seems to exist only to demonstrate a morally upright posture in accordance with current media standards. 

This creative motivation is purely defensive, and results in many of the iconic aspects of the original film being scrapped. The eponymous meanness of the film is completely sanded down, and Mean Girls (2024) lacks the artistic prowess to supplement these comedic gaps with anything substantial or original. Not only is this decision frustrating to the viewer, it's detrimental to our media literacy — if our instinct is to erase a film’s problems, rather than to consider them within a changing cultural context, we sacrifice our capacity for discussion in favor of tasteless revision. 

In order to combat the sheer volume of the original film’s appeal that has evaporated, Mean Girls (2024) resorts to sporadic and dissonant visual styles for its poorly incorporated musical numbers. These ephemeral stylistic choices undermine any artistic cohesion, resulting in an unsettling experience that echoes an image of the original without any compulsion or intrigue. 

Another significant component of the film’s failure is its status as an adaptation of the Broadway musical, itself an adaptation of the original film. The 2018 Broadway production was acclaimed for its expansive spectacle, transforming the beloved comedy into an entirely different format. But when the stage production is contorted to fit back into its original medium, the unfortunate result is a flattening of the integrity of the source material and a disintegration of the expansive stage adaptation. 

Mean Girls (2024) loses the bite of the original film and the spectacle of its stage predecessor. It yearns for the comfort of the original’s proven punchlines, while simultaneously rejecting them as archaic in an fraught attempt to stay ahead of the curve of political correctness. Every creative decision made in the production of Mean Girls (2024) is hesitant, resulting in a directionless, artless, and useless reinvention of a beloved classic. 

OVERALL SCORE - 2/10

Mean Girls was released on January 12, 2024 and is currently streaming on demand.