Last month Lindsay Lohan revealed she wants to do a Mean Girls sequel. “I have been trying so hard to do a Mean Girls 2,” she said, beaming ear to ear. “I’ve already written a treatment for it; I just need a response.” And that’s kind of the problem. The response – from original writer Tina Fey and almost 100% of people involved in the 2004 teen movie – has been cold to say the least; more like radio silence.
“I know Tina Fey and Lorne Michaels and all of Paramount are very busy,” she continued, “but I will keep forcing it and pushing it on them until we do it.”
Pretty sure “very busy” translates as “they’re avoiding my calls” in that sentence. Naturally she took to Instagram to very publicly push it on them (before she deleted every post on her account). A #tbt photo of herself and her co-stars was captioned, “Miss you all.… sequel?”
There was something deeply awkward about it, like a marriage proposal at a football game broadcast over a loud speaker met with a mild shrug. Maybe Lohan thought Tina Fey and co. would cave under pressure, with fans rallying around Lohan in the comments section, but no. For whatever reason – Lohan’s well-documented antics on set, rumors that Fey might be working on a sequel without Lohan, or the fact that her career needs this more than theirs do – it just didn’t happen.
And anyway, what would a Mean Girls sequel actually look like, some 13 years later?
First I have to mention the elephant in the room here: the 2011 sequel that already exists. Mean Girls 2 boasts the somewhat misleading tagline “The Plastics are back!” – misleading because none of them are actually back. It was made 7 years after the original, penned by someone who is not Tina Fey, and starred none of the original cast (with the exception of the guy who played Principal Ron Duvall).
It may have used the same font in the credits, the same North Shore High School name, and a voice-over from a wide-eyed teen starting a new high school where a #girlsquad called the Plastics rules. But it wasn’t fooling anyone. Mean Girls 2 lacks Fey’s whip-smart dialogue about high school tribes, and in short is cheap, charmless and so not fetch. “A thinly veiled, low-budget remake of the 2004 hit,” is how Entertainment Weekly described it at the time. No wonder everyone is pretending like this thing doesn’t exist.
Though the original’s bitchy girl squad gets a name check in that sequel, there’s no mention of Cady Heron or Regina George, the fierce queen of the Plastics. With Lohan desperate to return in her sequel, we can safely assume that she’ll be slipping back into the role of Cady, the new kid who enters a world of two-faced bitchiness and backstabbing.
Thing is, it’s now 2017 and Cady Heron is 13 years older, she’s no longer the new kid in town. That story has come and gone. Meaning this would not be a movie about mean high school girls. It would not be a movie about cafeteria tribes – the varsity jocks, Asian nerds, girls who eat their feelings, girls who don’t eat anything. This would not even be a movie about mean girls. Lohan is 30 years old now and that’s not the way her story – her treatment – would swing. (Might wanna rethink that title then, huh?)
Read: A comprehensive guide to girls on film.
The actress hinted, in a 2014 interview, at the direction she wanted to take. “I was with Tina Fey the other day and I said we should do another Mean Girls, like an older version where they’re all housewives and they’re all cheating. That would be really funny. I’ll harass Tina to write it.”
And you can imagine it. Regina George turns into her mum – played by Amy Poehler in the original – with a yappy dog stuffed in her handbag; the plastics, with their teen royalty days behind them, are now gossiping housewives, still making three-way calls and plunging their knives ever deeper in each other’s backs; they still wear pink on Wednesdays and Gretchen is still trying to make “fetch” happen; meanwhile Cady Heron is invited to a school reunion, falls for a married man, gets tangled up in some bitchy shit again, and by the end credits she’s risen above it all. Peace and harmony restored. Lohan on top, punching the sky.
Fey didn’t hint at any of that in the ending of the first film. In fact all roads pointed in different directions. The Plastics had disbanded, Regina had joined the lacrosse team, Gretchen had joined the “Cool Asians” and Cady had declared herself “normal”. The beef had ended, the drama was over. Realistically, Regina George and Cady Heron would probably never see each other after high school, their lives on completely different paths. I mean, how many “friends” do you see from high school now?
Lohan’s vision – obviously rehashing the same jokes, same lines, same characters – is even more curious when you hear her cast wish list. Along with Rachel McAdams she “would love to have Jamie Lee Curtis and Jimmy Fallon in the movie.” Curtis was her co-star in Freaky Friday, which makes some sense, but Jimmy Fallon, why Jimmy Fallon? He could pass for an older version of Aaron Samuels, I guess?
Ultimately, this sequel would be a vehicle for Lohan. She evidently had one simple thought in mind: that the best way to revive a career is to revisit the thing that helped launch it. But right now, if she wants to film her treatment of Mean Girls 2 (or Mean Women, when she rethinks the title?) it looks like she’ll need to do it herself. Which sounds like something she has legitimately thought about: “I’m looking to develop my own production company, my own branding company.” Keep your eyes peeled for that Kickstarter page. It’s definitely 100% gonna happen.
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Text Oliver Lunn