Mean Girls has now arrived in cinemas, bringing the Broadway musical adaptation of the classic 2004 movie to the big screen, but there have been changes along the way.
The musical featured 25 songs with music by Jeff Richmond and lyrics by Nell Benjamin, and the duo returned for the movie adaptation to rework their songs for the new version of Mean Girls.
It’s not a song-for-song adaptation though and you might be wondering what got lost along the way, not to mention what’s been added new for the movie version of the musical.
So here’s everything you need to know about the Mean Girls soundtrack.
Mean Girls soundtrack: All the songs featured in Mean Girls
The new Mean Girls movie features a total of 12 songs, mostly taken from the musical, with one extra new song playing over the credits.
Here’s the complete Mean Girls soundtrack:
• ‘A Cautionary Tale’
• ‘What Ifs’
• ‘Meet the Plastics’
• ‘Stupid with Love’
• ‘Apex Predator’
• ‘What’s Wrong with Me?’
• ‘Sexy’
• ‘Someone Gets Hurt’
• ‘Revenge Party’
• ‘World Burn’
• ‘I’d Rather Be Me’
• ‘I See Stars’
• ‘Not My Fault’
If you know the songs from the musical, they won’t sound exactly the same as they have been updated for the movie. The changes include lyric tweaks and also different compositions, so don’t just expect to hear the same song.
‘What Ifs’ is a new song for the movie written by Nell Benjamin and Reneé Rapp, although it’s performed in the movie by Angourie Rice. It’s a song that performs the same purpose as ‘It Roars’ from the musical, charting Cady’s journey from Africa to high school.
Rapp does, however, perform on the brand-new credits song ‘Not My Fault’ alongside Megan Thee Stallion, a song which Rapp also co-wrote.
You can buy the Mean Girls movie soundtrack from Amazon right now. If you still want to be a purist, then the Broadway soundtrack is also available to purchase from Amazon.
Which songs have been cut from the Mean Girls musical?
If you were already a fan of the Mean Girls musical, then you’ll know that a lot of the songs didn’t make the cut for the movie version.
Here’s all the songs that were cut from Mean Girls:
• ‘It Roars’
• ‘It Roars (Reprise)’
• ‘Where Do You Belong?’
• ‘Stupid with Love (Reprise)’
• ‘Fearless’
• ‘A Cautionary Tale (Reprise)’
• ‘Stop’
• ‘What’s Wrong with Me? (Reprise)’
• ‘Whose House Is This?’
• ‘More Is Better’
• ‘Someone Gets Hurt (Reprise)’
• ‘Do This Thing’
Some cuts make sense for a movie, such as removing all the reprises, while as mentioned above, ‘It Roars’ has been replaced by a new song (‘What Ifs’) that serves the same narrative purpose.
We already knew that Aaron was a non-singing role in the movie version, so that meant losing his duet with Cady (‘More Is Better’), as well as adapting ‘Someone Gets Hurt’ to be a Regina George solo number instead of the Regina and Aaron duet on stage.
It is a shame to lose both ‘Where Do You Belong?’ and ‘Stop’ though, as they are two of the biggest numbers for Damian in the musical, and we know that Jaquel Spivey would have done outstanding work with them for the movie.
Directors Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr told Variety that they had “countless conversations” over which songs to include and which to cut, adding that ‘Stop’ was the hardest one to skip.
“We tried many different things – nothing was safe. At one point we had cut ‘Apex Predator’ and we were like, ‘What are we doing?’,” Perez recalled.
Jayne added: “We love ‘Stop’. It’s a classic Broadway song and it plays so well on stage. But it wasn’t advancing the story. In cinema, you don’t have three hours. It has to be tight; it has to keep moving.”
Mean Girls is out now in cinemas.
Movies Editor, Digital Spy Ian has more than 10 years of movies journalism experience as a writer and editor. Starting out as an intern at trade bible Screen International, he was promoted to report and analyse UK box-office results, as well as carving his own niche with horror movies, attending genre festivals around the world. After moving to Digital Spy, initially as a TV writer, he was nominated for New Digital Talent of the Year at the PPA Digital Awards. He became Movies Editor in 2019, in which role he has interviewed 100s of stars, including Chris Hemsworth, Florence Pugh, Keanu Reeves, Idris Elba and Olivia Colman, become a human encyclopedia for Marvel and appeared as an expert guest on BBC News and on-stage at MCM Comic-Con. Where he can, he continues to push his horror agenda – whether his editor likes it or not.
