After its release on Jan. 12, 2024, the new Mean Girls movie has received overwhelmingly negative reviews from critics and moviegoers alike.

“The girls just aren’t as mean. The social hierarchies just aren’t as brutal. The betrayals and losses just aren’t as devastating — and it’s not just because we may have seen them before. It may be because the world has gotten meaner in the meantime,” San Diego Reader Matthew Lickona said.

While critics’ reviews may be more nuanced, for many people, their main issue with the movie is that it is a musical.

It’s not a lie that the movie was poorly advertised. Trailers rarely included song and dance, and for the casual moviegoer, it was easy to miss hints about the movie’s musical nature.

“The only thing that indicated it was a musical was [that] World Burn would play in the background, but if you didn’t know that [Regina] was singing, you probably wouldn’t know that that music was actually in the movie,” Hailey Williams (‘24) said.

While Williams knew the movie was a musical before watching it, Lily Klapper (‘25) didn’t.

“I was really upset,” Klapper said. “The Mean Girls movie is my favorite movie of all time, and I didn’t expect most of it to be singing and dancing.”

But even fans of the musical, which debuted in 2017, were disappointed after leaving the theater.

“I am a musical fan, which is a shame that I didn’t like the songs towards the end,” Jazzmine Munguia (‘25) said.

However, moviegoers like Aurora Holguin (‘24) went in with an open mind and came out of the theater smiling.

“I thought it was really good,” Holguin said. “I loved it when Janis sang.”

While Mean Girls (2024) may not have lived up to the 2004 movie or 2017 musical, if you can push that aside, the movie is still a fun watch.