Mean Girls and the movie to musical to movie pipeline

Mean Girls, the movie-musical adaption that opens in theaters this weekend, feels like both an inevitable release and a bizarre confluence of trends that began long before its young cast was even born. We know that Hollywood will take any opportunity to expand an existing piece of intellectual property in a bid to make more cash; they kind of tried this already with Mean Girls’ ill-advised straight-to-ABC Family sequel in 2011. The decision to revisit the property as a straight remake but with songs is something that has only happened a handful of times. But given how recently the same thing happened with The Color Purple, we could be entering a new era of the movie to musical to movie musical pipeline. This phase is based, above all else, on the recognition of an old piece of film, but with some songs thrown in to justify its existence.

The story of how we ended up with movie-to-musical-to-movie musical adaptions of both The Color Purple and Mean Girls playing simultaneously in theaters across the country starts in 2001 with The Producers. Based on the 1968 Mel Brooks film, The Producers became the biggest hit of the 2001 Broadway season, won a record-breaking 12 Tony Awards, and made a ton of money. And even though it was a film first, when a Broadway musical is that successful, a film adaptation is all but guaranteed.

Even before The Producers, most Broadway musicals were based on something. Historically, it was common to adapt operas (Rent, Miss Saigon) biographies (Evita, Hamilton), and Shakespearean texts (Kiss Me Kate, West Side Story). There were plenty of musicals in Broadway’s Golden Age based on films, too; Nine and Sweet Charity are both based on Fellini films, and Sondheim’s A Little Night Music was based on an Ingmar Bergman film. (All three of these were later adapted back into movie musicals, too.)

Broadway figured out how to cash in on the Intellectual Property boom long before Hollywood did. In the 1990s, Disney adapted Beauty And The Beast and The Lion King into stage shows. Those were already movie musicals, so the transition was pretty natural, and The Producers was a Broadway-centric plot with a couple of existing songs, so that transition made sense too. The latter’s success, however, spawned an avalanche of successful, mainstream American films being turned into stage musicals, including Hairspray, Young Frankenstein, Legally Blonde, The Color Purple, Bring It On, and Mean Girls. Hairspray was also adapted back into a movie musical (and it remains one of the best in the genre, regardless of source material).

To anyone who has paid attention to Hollywood in the past two decades, this latest push should sound familiar. There was a spate of remakes of Baby Boom-era classics in the early 2000s (Stepford Wives, Yours, Mine, and Ours, Freaky Friday …). There were also a bunch of film series based on popular novels, kicking off with the Lord Of The Rings and Harry Potter series. Today, it’s endless sequels or endless live-action remakes of animated Disney movies. Though quality can vary with the latter, it’s fairly clear that these are exercises in brand extension, a way to bring audiences into theaters by tantalizing them with a familiar favorite. Usually, these remakes provide at least something new: updates to lyrics, new songs, updates to potentially outdated gender roles.

The thing with this most recent adaptation of Mean Girls that stands out, though, is that it only seems to have a passing interest in being a musical. The stage production, which opened on Broadway in 2018, is hardly a masterpiece, but it is decent, and it has some fun Broadway pastiche across its score. But Mean Girls 2024 cuts almost all of the group numbers, instead focusing on solos or duets, which have also been rearranged to sound like pop songs. Truthfully, it’s more like a live-action Disney remake, updated to suit modern sensibilities, where the characters occasionally burst into song at random.

It really doesn’t matter how good or bad Mean Girls (2024) is, though, because the original film has been one of the internet’s favorite movies for almost 20 years. Hairspray and Little Shop Of Horrors, another standout in the genre, were not based on wildly popular films, and live theater is inherently a niche, exclusive audience. Those film adaptations needed to stand on their own because audiences generally weren’t going to see a musical adaptation of a John Waters film (they were going to see Zac Efron, more likely). But an audience will go see something that says Mean Girls (or The Color Purple, or Matilda) because it’s a beloved film and they’re predisposed to like it.

It stands to reason that there will be more movies based on musicals based on movies. Both Spamalot and Sunset Boulevard are reportedly in development, and maybe one or both of them will be pretty good. Maybe Legally Blonde, a musical adaptation that turned out far better than anyone expected, will make a decent movie musical. But if we’ve learned anything over the past couple of years in Hollywood, it’s that it doesn’t have to be to make a lot of money; it just has to be called Legally Blonde.

On the same topic, Dan Murrell (probably my favourite critic) dissects why Hollywood is ashamed of promoting the fact the movie musicals it makes are musicals.