Mean Girls 2024 fumbles the chance to examine modern girlhood
The new Mean Girls musical landed in Australian cinemas this year with a marketing blitz that assumes audiences already feel warm nostalgia for the 2004 original. For many viewers it works as comfort viewing, a sing-along reminder of high school hierarchies and that iconic Burn Book. Yet beneath the pink confetti, the film never seriously grapples with what girlhood actually looks like in 2024, particularly for teenagers scrolling curated feeds under constant surveillance.
A satire reboot should sharpen the original's blade, not just polish it. The first film skewered the petty cruelty of upper-middle-class American teens with a precision that felt earned. This version mostly repackages the same jokes with shinier choreography, leaving untouched the urgent questions about how digital life, racial politics, and economic precarity shape contemporary adolescence.
Australian audiences watching from Brisbane loungerooms or Carlton cinemas might find the disconnect stark. Local teen culture runs on its own rhythms, from state high schoolyards to the codes of selective schools in Sydney's eastern suburbs, and the film barely registers the difference.
The result is a tribute act rather than a meaningful intervention. A genuinely feminist Mean Girls for the algorithm era would have asked harder questions about whose girlhood counts, who gets to be cruel, and how teenage girls absorb the ambient misogyny of the wider culture.
Why the 2004 satire still cuts deeper
The original Mean Girls worked as comedy because it had genuine teeth. Tina Fey's screenplay understood Regina George as a product of an ecosystem where femininity was weaponised against other girls and popularity required constant performance.
Cady Heron's outsider arc gave the film critical distance. We saw the Plastics' behaviour as something to be decoded rather than merely laughed at, and the closing message about seeing other girls as allies rather than competitors landed with conviction.
| Element | Original 2004 film | 2024 musical reboot |
|---|---|---|
| Primary medium of cruelty | Burn Book and whispered gossip | Replicated Burn Book, brief social media nods |
| Critique of femininity | Sustained satire of performative girlhood | Mostly aestheticised through choreography |
| Racial and class subtext | Present but underexplored | Acknowledged visually, absent structurally |
| Ending tone | Earnest solidarity with a soft bite | Feel-good musical resolution |
Twenty years on, those choices feel dated rather than deepened. The musical simply restages the original beats on a glossier set, without asking what happens to the Plastics formula when the school has been remade by phone cameras, livestreamed bullying, and the gig economy.
Modern girlhood has changed since 2004
The teenager of 2024 is not the teenager of 2004, and a satire that ignores this is satire of a memory. Where the original captured the age of AIM away messages and disposable film cameras, the present moment runs on TikTok drafts, finstas, and the sense that every social misstep can become content.
Modern girlhood involves a particular set of pressures the reboot barely glances at:
- Curating a public self across Instagram, TikTok, and BeReal while maintaining a private close-friends tier
- Negotiating beauty standards shaped by filter culture and the resurgence of tradwife aesthetics online
- Living with school shooting drills, climate dread, and gendered viral harassment simultaneously
- Watching male politicians debate their bodily autonomy on the very phones they scroll
A film that took any of these seriously could have made its satire land for a generation that has not yet seen a Mean Girls built around its actual anxieties.
Girl-on-girl cruelty in the group chat era
Modern girl-on-girl cruelty does not primarily live in a spiral-bound notebook. It lives in screenshots, subtweets, and curated close-friends lists. A Mean Girls for the present moment could have examined how digital platforms reshape the in-group, making exclusion more granular and more public than Regina George ever managed.
The reboot gestures at this with the occasional phone reference but never commits. The Burn Book scenes are recreated almost beat for beat, with the same gag about pulling apart a classmate's appearance.
There is also the question of how girl-on-girl aggression intersects with broader patterns of gendered harm. As feminist writers have argued in explorations of male violence, the way girls treat each other cannot be separated from the violent world they are growing up inside. A sharper film would have asked why teenage girls so often reproduce the punitive dynamics they themselves absorb.
The musical numbers mostly aestheticise the cruelty rather than anatomise it. A song about a Burn Book in 2024 could have been genuinely unsettling if it had explored the lasting digital footprint of teenage meanness. Instead, it functions as set piece.
Race, class, and whose girlhood counts
The original film's racial politics were already uneven, and the reboot inherits those problems without addressing them. The Plastics remain coded as wealthy and white, while supporting characters of colour often function as moral compass or comic relief.
A truly contemporary Mean Girls could have interrogated how race and class shape who gets to be a mean girl in the cultural imagination. The figure of mean-girl cruelty has been overwhelmingly white, even as teenage girls of every background navigate brutal social hierarchies. Centring girls who are not wealthy, white, or conventionally feminine would have given the satire real urgency.
The 2024 version tries, slightly, with a more diverse ensemble, but the script does not know what to do with this beyond visual representation. A reboot genuinely interested in intersectional girlhood would have built its plot around how race, sexuality, and class inflect the Plastics' power.
The musical format softens the edge
There is something flattening about turning a sharp-tongued satire into a Broadway musical. Songs externalise interior life, but the original Mean Girls was funny because its characters hid their interiority behind deadpan delivery. When everyone starts singing their motivations, the mystery evaporates.
The new film is professionally executed and catchy in places, yet it rarely carries critical weight. Compared with the way Booksmart used dialogue and editing to convey teenage pressure, the reboot feels oddly old-fashioned.
Worse, the musical format pulls the film toward the safest register. Songs tend toward uplift and resolution, and the musical makes the original's already pat ending more pronounced, wrapping the satire in feel-good closure.
What a feminist reboot could have done differently
A genuinely feminist Mean Girls for 2024 would have kept its humour while aiming it at a culture that shapes girls, rather than only at the girls themselves.
- Build the plot around how phone cameras and livestreamed incidents reshape bullying and accountability
- Centre girls outside affluent American suburb tropes, including First Nations, migrant, and working-class perspectives
- Examine the rise of pick-me culture, tradwife aesthetics, and algorithm-driven femininity
- End on genuine solidarity rather than a choreographed number that papers over real frictions
Watching the new film in Brisbane or Sydney, it is hard not to think about how local girls might have responded to a more honest portrayal. Australian school culture does not map onto the American suburb Tina Fey imagined, and films like Bump and Looking for Alibrandi show that local teen stories can interrogate gender and class with real nuance.
The reboot offers a glossy nostalgia trip that asks nothing of its viewers. That is its own kind of disappointment, particularly for teenage girls who deserve cinema that takes their actual lives seriously.
If you want more feminist media criticism that reckons with how women and girls navigate a hostile culture, subscribe to the newsletter and dig through the archives. The original Mean Girls earned its legacy by being unafraid to be mean back; the reboot could have honoured that by being brave enough to be relevant.