No need to bake a cake made out of rainbows and smiles, because we already have happy news for Mean Girls fans. After it was announced early last year that Tina Fey was developing a remake of her 2004 classic through an adaptation of the Broadway hit Mean Girls: The Musical. And the movie is finally moving forward through development with its directors picked out and ready to retell the story of Cady Heron and her revenge on the Plastics.
Mean Girls: The Musical is starting to get ready for production under Paramount with a script by Tina Fey, and now with a pair of directors set to helm the movie: Arturo Perez Jr and Samantha Jayne, per Variety. If those names don’t ring a bell, it’s probably because the upcoming Broadway adaptation will be each of their first films to date.
Perez Jr and Jayne are frequent collaborators who previously created the short-form Hulu series Quarter Life Poetry in 2019 and a few other short films. Since this will be their highest-profile project yet, there’s not a lot to go on as far as how they will inform Mean Girls: The Musical, but the news most certainly means that things are really starting to come together for the remake.
After Tina Fey wrote and starred in her quotable teen comedy that is etched in a generation, Mean Girls: The Musical made its debut in Washington D.C. back in 2017. The musical then moved over to Broadway in 2018 at the August Wilson Theatre and played over 800 shows for audiences before closing down with many other Broadway productions during the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s not expected to return to New York City, though it will be touring the U.S. and moving to the UK’s West End.
Per the report, the original Broadway cast will not be playing their roles in Mean Girls: The Musical because they’ve since become “too old” to play their high school roles. We’d then imagine some major casting will be in the works for the film in the near future. Though we’ll note that Rachel McAdams was 25 when she played Regina George.
Work It’s Sabrina Carpenter briefly joined the Broadway show in early 2020 for the two days before Broadway shut down due to COVID-19 to play Cady Heron, in what was originally going to be a three-month run. Perhaps, the 22-year-old actress and singer could be a good pick for the movie adaptation of the musical?
Musicals have been all the rage in Hollywood recently with Broadway hit Dear Evan Hansen hitting theaters this weekend following Everybody’s Talking About Jamie hitting Amazon Prime a couple weeks ago and Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story set to hit theaters this holiday season. Hey, and maybe this time around Gretchen will make “fetch” happen?
