Mean Girls final trailer promises new tricks with old jokes

Let’s say it one more time for anyone who might’ve missed it: the new Mean Girls remake is a musical! Much has been made of the fact that the marketing for the film, which premieres January 12, seems allergic to letting the audience know that this is an adaptation of the Broadway show, not just the 2004 movie. The final trailer is no exception: though there’s a brief snippet of Reneé Rapp singing “Meet The Plastics” in the background, there’s little else to indicate the musical nature of the film besides a brief dance break from Karen (Avantika).

What there is a lot of is the old familiar jokes you remember from the original Mean Girls. Regina saying “Get in, loser,” Cady (Angourie Rice) being an awkward transfer student, Coach Carr (Jon Hamm) being inappropriate, Karen failing to crowd surf at the gym assembly, Regina’s mom (Busy Phillipps) being “cool,” Principal Duvall being shocked by the Burn Book, Janis (Auli’i Cravalho) calling Regina a “scum-sucking life ruiner” (“roadwhore” is apparently a bridge too far in the year 2024).

It’s not that these rehashes are such a bad thing. The sharp script is what made fans fall in love with Mean Girls in the first place, and selling nostalgia makes a certain sense from a marketing perspective. What’s not clicking is that the trailer promises “A new twist from Tina Fey” while relying almost exclusively on old beats. If this really is “not your mother’s Mean Girls,” as an earlier trailer proclaimed, why does it look so much like the classic Mean Girls?

Mean Girls 2024, coming two decades after the Lindsay Lohan-led version, has plenty of its own merits. In particular, the film boasts a talented young cast with breakout star Rapp as the Queen of Mean. Previous trailers have also teased a social media element that has the potential to be a truly interesting update to the high school jungle. Then there’s the music, however much of the Broadway numbers remain in the final cut of the film—this final trailer invites viewers to the revenge party, but it doesn’t even feature the song “Revenge Party”! Instead, we’ll have to content ourselves with a Mean Girls-themed Megan Thee Stallion track and leave the rest of the music to the imagination until the movie hits theaters.