Media and Music: On Wednesdays, We Adapt Musicals into Movies with Varied Success
The 2024 “Mean Girls” movie — an adaptation of a book into a movie into a musical into a movie — has received a lot of mean words online. While some of the musical numbers are definitely plastic, some of them shine brighter than the Broadway musical.
In Media and Music, our writers take a deep dive into how movies use scores and songs to engage viewers, give new meaning and tone to some of our favorite scenes, and establish themes. It almost goes without saying, but there are spoilers abound.
Written by William Beachum
Photo courtesy of Paramount Pictures
Musical theater Tiktok veered into the mainstream with the release of the 2024 movie adaptation of “Mean Girls.” The main critique of the film has been its music, with younger fans citing lackluster vocal performances and de-energized instrumentation as the two main offenders. Videos of Tiktok users comparing the original Broadway soundtrack to the 2024 soundtrack have gone viral, spoiling online public opinion with a general distaste.
While the new “Mean Girls” is not perfect, writing the movie’s soundtrack off as a failure of an adaptation feels unfair. The creators suspend reality through intentionally placed moments of musical whimsy and form truth by adapting the original Broadway arrangements to a more realistic cinematic setting
Both adaptations follow protagonist Cady Heron and her adjustment to the social scene of a new high school after moving to Illinois from Kenya. She befriends Janis and Damian, who encourage her to strike revenge on Regina George and “the plastics,” a group of three girls at the top of the social food chain. By the end of the films, Cady learns that everyone can be “plastic” and that you have to stay true to yourself. The 2017 musical and the 2024 movie both take different approaches to telling this story through song, but they hold similar musical timelines.
The 2024 movie swaps out the Broadway musical’s “It Roars” for an original song, “What Ifs.” In both adaptations, the respective track acts as an “I Want” song for Cady Heron, processing her needs and wants as a character in an archetypal method for character exploration in musical theater. Broadway’s “It Roars” spends most of its runtime establishing the setting of Kenya, with animal noises and a cheeky “jungle-like” instrumentation. Besides a crass joke on obesity, the song adequately describes what “roars” inside of Cady while also providing vital exposition for the audience.
2024’s “What Ifs” feels like a necessary evil to help explain Cady’s background to the audience. Runtime and budget inhibit “It Roars” from appearing in the movie due to its Kenya setting, making its replacement inherently lackluster. “What Ifs” does a fine job of giving Cady a manageably pleasant song to sing that gives the needed information to the audience. In the lightly inspirational ballad, Heron softly warbles out that she thought that she would be “happy right where her story began,” but now, she doesn’t “wanna live with what ifs” because “that’s not the me that [she is].” A song like “What Ifs” establishes Cady’s unhappiness in her hometown and desire for change to the audience through a musical number. It is especially necessary if music is designated as the language that transmits emotions to the viewer, as it is in this adaptation. The song is nothing special, with its generic four-chord structure blending in with a mediocre Spotify “indie-pop” playlist, but it serves its purpose nonetheless.
The controversial new movie also heavily alters fan-favorite “Meet The Plastics,” which introduces the power, glamor, and quirks of the main antagonists “The Plastics.” The Broadway adaptation gives each plastic a different tempo as a fun way of character exposition. Gretchen’s introduction is hurried and rushed, mirroring her anxiety to please Regina. Karen’s riff is lethargic, reflecting her vacuous personality. Regina stays at the song’s tempo to reflect that her goal is the key one. The three plastics’ inaugurations all collide in the end, with a dynamic cadence letting them all align and stay on the same agenda, musically and ideologically.
2024’s “Meet The Plastics” exclusively introduces Regina, which creates a multitude of problems story-wise. By not establishing Regina’s sidekicks and her power over them, her power seems much less tangible. The hierarchy feels surface-level with Regina blatantly saying “My name is Regina George / and I am a massive deal” to the camera. The lack of introduction to Gretchen also makes the clumsy “What’s Wrong With Me” fall flat due to Gretchen’s unclear role in the dynamic between the protagonist and antagonist.
The most stark difference between the two soundtracks stands in “Stupid With Love,” the song that establishes Cady’s interest in Aaron Samuels, Regina George’s prize. 2024’s “Stupid With Love” slows the number down heavily, turning the original energetic show tune into a more doo-wop style crooner. While users on TikTok have condemned this change for the lack of energy in the film version of the song, this choice was simply made to adapt to the medium of film.
While Heron actress Angourie Rice’s performance could use some pitch correction, the change in instrumentation in “Stupid With Love” is meant to adapt to the reality of film. Due to the direct confrontation, closeness, and intimacy of “Mean Girls,” a bombastically lustful song like the original “Stupid With Love” would make the audience feel that Cady’s desire is unrealistic. The new rendition of “Stupid With Love” effectively demonstrates that this love is innocent and establishes her desire for Aaron Samuels. Structurally, Cady acts as a stand-in for the audience, so viewers need to believe the reality of her love and see how this love could drive her shift in morals. As seen in “Revenge Party,” the idea that Cady will “end up with Aaron when she’s gone” partly drives Cady to strike revenge on Regina, which begins Cady’s downfall as a character. In order for watchers to connect with Cady as a character and understand her story arc, they need to empathize with her motivations, which are laid out in “Stupid With Love.”
2024’s “Apex Predator” is a much simpler improvement on the original, with newfound rhythmic vocal modulations adding to the intensity and pulsation of the song. Embracing a hip-hop production style in this new version adds to the track’s vigor and potency. In the electric track, Janis and Damian, the story's narrators, explain to Cady how “in this beastly school” Regina George is the “apex predator.” The song, however, was originally sung as a duet between Cady and Janis. Sonically, this change works quite nicely, as the addition of Damian's higher, nasal vocal frequencies complements Janis’s throaty alto voice. Jaquel Spivey and Cravahlo create an impassioned, daunting atmosphere, especially seen in a bone-chilling ending vocal harmony.
Karen’s Halloween solo “Sexy” continues the trend of sonic improvement, with the addition of a thumping, kickass bass line driving the movie’s number to a much more energetic product. Something straight out of a 2000’s-era Daft Punk track, the added electric guitar helps ground this goofy song into a real, palpable groove. The Broadway romp “Sexy” uses digital synthesizers to drive the song and make its chaotic power feel insecure. The 2024 “Sexy” fully engulfs the audience in Karen’s fantasy, with the movie giving Karen’s boldness the instrumental dignity it needs to sell her worldview. Avantika’s 2024 performance of “Sexy” also makes a lyric change in the bridge from “This is modern feminism talking / I expect to run the world / In shoes I can not walk in” to “Watch me run the world / In shoes I can not walk in.” The new lyric acknowledges that Karen is not necessarily smart, but her confidence makes her feel sexy. The movie allows the audience to form their own opinion on Karen’s confidence rather than disarming it through a covert acknowledgment of stupidity in a throwaway line.
“Someone Gets Hurt” plays out relatively the same in the musical and the film adaptation, with an especially cool visual sequence at the Halloween party helping elevate the latter. Alternatively, the movie’s main slip-up comes with Tina Fey and Jeff Richmond’s handling of “Revenge Party.” The most energetic number in the original Broadway musical, “Revenge Party” features a montage of Janis and Damian’s rage playing out through an impassioned rock ballad. The track has much to cover plot-wise, with only five minutes to cover around 20 minutes of the 2004 movie’s context. The song’s plot importance makes the production of the 2024’s version especially disappointing and narratively catastrophic. If the audience doesn’t believe Janis and Damian’s anger and how it drives Cady to sabotage Regina, the movie loses the threat of Janis and Damian as antagonists because they don’t seem like a real danger to Cady. If the viewers don’t believe that anyone on the social hierarchy can be mean and nasty, then the movie’s message that “everyone can be plastic” gets compromised because only the popular people are taken seriously as antagonists.
Instrumentally, the new “Revenge Party” relies on synthetic horns, aggressive autotune, and a weak drum beat to drive this originally energetic number. Cravahlo and Spivey try their best to help this song, but their washed out vocals make the entire song feel like it's played on a speaker phone.
“World Burn” stays relatively intact, with only the visuals of the song making 2024’s version markedly worse. Breaking from the trend of the usage of live, on-set vocal recordings in Tom Hooper’s “Les Miserables” as well as the mix of studio vocals and live recordings seen in “Dear Evan Hansen,” the 2024 “Mean Girls” opts only to use studio recordings. Doing so entails that all actors are lip-syncing to a pre-recorded studio track, which is singularly harmful on “World Burn.” In the film, Regina sings the powerful track with sly confidence while walking through a red hall full of raging high schoolers. This approach is an inventive visual representation of Regina’s ownership of her confidence, but Reneé Rapp’s subtle, conniving attitude is completely undercut by the disconnected sound of her screaming out a flurry of high notes. Rapp belts up to an E5 on this song but looks like she’s filing her taxes while doing it.
The 2024 “Mean Girls” makes two great adaptive choices in its music to finish off its run. It first swaps out Broadway’s “Do This Thing” for a garage rock cover of “Stupid with Love” to soundtrack the final math competition scene. This muddy yet driven cover is softly shouted by the band performing at the school’s “Spring Fling,” which feels accurate to what a modern high school band would perform. For the finale, “I See Stars,” Fey and Richmond know they can not realistically sell the original ostentatious musical theater ballad. Instead, they open the number with a soft reflection from Cady and then give the rest of the song to the vocalist of the band at their spring fling to perform. The band’s vocalist is a joke character from the earlier trust fall scene, being the girl that “doesn’t even go here” in the crowd of betrayed women, which creates humor and decentralizes Cady’s narrative. The switch of vocalist lets the filmmakers give a conclusion to everyone’s story, including Janis’, Damian’s, and Gretchen’s, instead of focusing solely on Cady. The movie wraps with Damian and Janis cheesily narrating the moral of the story to the audience, once more reminding watchers that this adaptation is not without its faults.
The movie adaptation of Broadway’s “Mean Girls” acts as a lesson to the Internet, for the millionth time, not to dogpile a piece of art and be mean girls. It has a lot of slip-ups, including some big ones in “Meet The Plastics” and “Revenge Party,” but some songs are simply just adapted to fit the medium of film, like “Stupid With Love” and “I See Stars.” Some songs even soar past their Broadway versions through bold instrumentation change, including “Apex Predator” and “Sexy.” On the surface, this soundtrack might seem less enticing, but when taking a deeper look, the creators treated this adaptation with musical care and narrative solidarity.
The 2024 “Mean Girls” doesn’t really need to exist, but now that it does, let’s be nice and just watch a fun movie with some “fetch” musical numbers.