It’s been exactly 24 years since the best teen comedy of the 21st century was released, and its outsized influence on the genre in the last two and a half decades is tough to overstate. There are a lot of iconic teen movies from the 1980s and 1990s, from John Hughes classics like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and The Breakfast Club to clever reworkings of classic literary texts, like Cruel Intentions, Clueless, and 10 Things I Hate About You. However, only one teen movie from the 2000s could be dubbed the decade’s most iconic entry into the genre.
Released 24 years ago on April 30, 2004, Mean Girls was written by Hollywood comedy legend Tina Fey and directed by Freaky Friday’s Mark Waters. With an ensemble cast that included Rachel McAdams, Amanda Seyfried, Amy Poehler, Lizzy Caplan, Tim Meadows, and Lacey Chabert, Mean Girls starred Lindsay Lohan as the naive high-school transfer student Cady. Thrust into the cutthroat world of social politics without warning, Cady soon becomes a pawn in a popularity contest between the school’s glamorous girl group, the Plastics.
When the likeable outcasts Janice and Damian take a shine to Cady, they convince her to infiltrate the Plastics so Janice can orchestrate some long-harboured revenge fantasies on her nemesis, the group’s queen bee, Regina George. Things soon spiral out of control as Cady becomes a full-blown member of the Plastics and, eventually, grows even more toxic than her manipulative mentor, Regina. Loosely based on the non-fiction book Queen Bees and Wannabes by Rosalind Wiseman, Mean Girls is a uniquely cutting, but still warm-hearted, teen comedy.
Although there are a few other credible contenders for the title of the best teen movie since the year 2000, none of these other contenders can really compare to Mean Girls in terms of cultural impact. Director Rian Johnson’s high school noir Brick and 2002’s trippy Donnie Darko were both ingenious bits of genre experimentation, but they were way too niche to have the cultural impact of Mean Girls. 2022’s Do Revenge is a truly superb satirical thriller that updates Hitchcock’s classic Strangers On A Train as a teen comedy, but its entire story and style owes an obvious creative debt to Mean Girls.
Of course, Do Revenge isn’t alone in this. Easy A, the great 2023 indie comedy Bottoms, John Tucker Must Die, The Duff, She’s The Man, and Angus, Thongs & Perfect Snogging all borrow from the 2004 movie’s sense of humor, while director Bo Burnham’s sensitive, thoughtful debut Eighth Grade and 2017’s darker dramedy Edge of Seventeen both share their social commentary and poignant drama with Fey’s slyly empathetic screenplay. Meanwhile, Booksmart and Unpregnant share their approachable introduction to feminist ideas with Mean Girls.
Even the gender-flipped She’s All That remake, He’s All That, has the same director as Mean Girls, further proving that the shadow of this classic is inescapable in the world of post-2000 teen movies. While its 2024 musical remake couldn’t recapture the same magic as the original movie, Mean Girls remains a truly iconic and irreplaceable entry into the teen movie canon over 20 years after its debut.
