Mean Girls Times Two: "Sequels" In The Works

Rumors of a straight-to-DVD Mean Girls sequel have been confirmed by SlashFilm. Also: Mean Moms! Without Tina Fey and Lindsay Lohan, it’s hard to get excited about it. But it’s worth thinking about how the 2004 classic should be updated.

Last month, Variety reported that Mean Moms was in the works, about a “happily married mother of two who moves from small town America to the high class suburbs and is faced with confronting the cut throat world of competitive parenting.” Now comes word of Mean Girls 2. Here’s the plot summary, from a press release:

The story revolves around a new high school student, Jo, who agrees to befriend an outcast, Abby, at the urging of Abby’s wealthy father in exchange for paying all of Jo’s costs for the college of her dreams. Jo and Abby team up to take on the school’s “mean girls,” the Plastics. The story becomes a high stakes battle of loyalty that ultimately comes to a head when one of our heroines finds out that her friendship has been bought and paid for.

There is also a hilariously tokenizing casting call in Atlanta that includes the following entries:

Anyone with cool/ funky hairstyle, eyeglasses, or “Art Gallery” looks…

Looking for Asian-American and Latin-American actors for very featured bit roles.

Will black background players get any “very featured bit roles”? The original saw Regina George’s line, “That’s the ugliest effing skirt I’ve ever seen,” delivered to a “very featured bit” African-American actress. But apparently not that much progress has been made in the last six years.

There is no hope, of course, of reuniting the original team of the teen classic, given that most of them are doing so brilliantly now. Tina Fey is ruling comedy on TV and film. Rachel McAdams is a major leading lady. Amanda Seyfried is a fast-rising star. And Lindsay — well, it’s a long story we all know very well. And… poor Lacey Chabert! She’s done voice work for several Spider-Man cartoon episodes as well as Bratz: Passion 4 Fashion – Diamondz, and a TV movie for the Hallmark Channel. Do I sound like a Mean Girl right now or what?

What about updating the content? The pitch-perfect satire of Mean Girls was about many things involving girls, high school, and friendship, but it’s come to stand in for nasty female behavior of all sorts, including for Carly Fiorina this week. And while the Internet and texting existed when the movie came out, it was all but invisible in Mean Girls, technology has since enabled all sorts of cruel behavior to be disseminated more rapidly than ever.

Rosalind Wiseman, author of the book that inspired the movie, released an updated edition, mostly to include cyberbullying. That’s included behavior that has been compared to Mean Girls including YouTube videos of girls pummeling their victims, suicides after abusive questions on Formspring.me and suicides after being tricked by a fake MySpace profile. Of course, low-tech girl-on-girl bullying also still exists. So they’re probably fine either way.

Mean Girls 2 Greenlit, Plot Details And Director Revealed [Slashfilm]
Mean Girls Followup “Mean Moms” In The Works [MTV]