Mean Girls is a high school teen comedy released in 2004 by Paramount Pictures, starring Lindsay Lohan and Rachel McAdams. Mark Waters directed the script written by Tina Fey, adapted from the self-help book Queen Bees and Wannabes by Rosalind Wiseman, which examines the inner workings of female cliques in high school and the detrimental effects they can have on developing young women. As well as penning the screenplay, Fey stars in the movie as Ms. Norbury, a math teacher. Produced by Lorne Michaels, best known as the longtime show-runner of Saturday Night Live, the film assembles a core team of veteran SNL performers like Fey herself, Amy Poehler, Tim Meadows, and Ana Gasteyer.
Fey's script grounds the viewer in the perspective of new student Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan), the daughter of two research zoologists, who has been home-schooled while living abroad in Africa with her parents (Ana Gasteyer and Neil Flynn) for the past twelve years. When the film opens, she has just moved to Evanston, Illinois, attending public school for the first time at North Shore High. Cady's naïveté about the realities of public school--and American culture more broadly--is her defining feature. For instance, she blithely approaches strangers on the first day of school, never recognizes songs on the radio, and wears a misguided costume to a classmate's Halloween party. The corruption and redemption of Cady's innocence provides the dramatic arc of the plot.
After first reading the script, Lindsay Lohan was immediately drawn to and read for the part of the villain Regina George, but the casting team felt she was one of only a few young actresses strong enough to play the complex protagonist, Cady Heron. Ironically, Rachel McAdams won the role of Regina George in part because producers felt her "kind and polite" energy was an ideal match for Regina's sweet (but insincere) brand of evil. Lacey Chabert, Amanda Seyfried, Lizzy Caplan, Daniel Franzese, and Jonathan Bennett were cast in key supporting roles.
Mean Girls was a critical and commercial smash hit, earning $129 million on a $17 million budget. With the film's release coming on the heels of the equally successful Freaky Friday (2003), Lindsay Lohan's stock as a young actress continued to skyrocket. The film also helped launch the careers of Rachel McAdams, Amanda Seyfried, and Lizzy Caplan. Although she has continued to act in a number of other films, Mean Girls remains Fey's only feature-length film script to date.
Mean Girls is also arguably one of very few films from the last twenty years that has created a full-blown and enduring cultural phenomenon. E! Online's 2014 article "The 20 Best Mean Girls Quotes From Grool to Totally Fetch" provides some sense of how deeply the film's one-liners have become ingrained in the popular imagination of American media consumers, even now over a decade after its release. In 2013, the White House tweeted a photo of Barack Obama's dog Bo with the caption, "Bo, stop trying to make fetch happen." On social media, October 3rd is now "Mean Girls Day"—a reference to Cady's line to Aaron Samuels in math class. Countless lines still circulate on social media in the form of gifs and memes, such as Regina's "Why are you so obsessed with me?" and Damian's "You go, Glenn Coco!"
A made-for-TV movie sequel, Mean Girls 2, aired on ABC Family in 2011, not written by Fey, with only Tim Meadows reprising his role as Mr. Duvall. In September 2017, Scholastic released a novel based on the film, written by Micol Ostow. A loose sequel Mean Moms was in production for a time in 2014-2015 before being put on hold. Lohan has remarked in interviews that she has considerable interest in eventually being in a sequel, written by Fey.
